by Philip Kerr
X
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 31-
MONDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 1943,
WASHINGTON, D.C.
THORNTON COLE disliked homosexuals. Not loudly. He just disliked them for what he imagined were moral reasons and, when homosexuals worked for the government, for security reasons, too. He thought they might be blackmailed. Cole headed up the German desk at the State Department and had admired Sumner Welles as a farsighted internationalist, much to be preferred to the elderly and unimaginative Cordell Hull. But now, following the resignation of the assistant secretary of state and the rumors about Welles’s homosexuality, Cole had felt obliged to revise his good opinion of Welles—the more so when, upon recalling his own meetings with the man, he fancied that he might once have been the object of a pass.
Like Welles, Thornton Cole had been a Grottie—a graduate of Groton. Another well-connected Grottie, Willard Mayer, had introduced Cole to Welles, and after that, at Welles’s instigation, the two men had met a couple of times at Washington’s Metropolitan Club. Cole had been flattered by the older man’s attention, and even what now looked to be a clumsy pass had not set off alarm bells. It had happened a few years back, also at the Metropolitan. Welles had had too much to drink and in the course of the evening had compared Cole’s profile to that of Michelangelo’s David, adding, “Of course I can’t answer how your body compares, but your head is certainly as handsome as David’s.” Sumner Welles was married, with children, and Thornton Cole had been of the opinion that the assistant secretary of state’s words were merely maladroit and certainly not evidence of any sexual attraction. Now, of course, the remark looked very different. This realization upset Thornton Cole quite disproportionately, and, reasoning that Welles was hardly likely to be the only homosexual in the State Department, he had written down the names of the other men he suspected of being secretly queer: Lawrence Duggins (Welles’s former deputy), Alger Hiss, who was assistant to Stanley Hornbech, the State Department’s political adviser in charge of Far Eastern affairs, and David Melon, who worked for Cole on the German desk. Cole resolved to keep tabs on each of them. He focused first on his own deputy, and the nascent idea that he might uncover a whole nest of fags in State began to take hold of his imagination when he discovered that Melon was friendly with a man named Lovell White. Cole added White’s name to his list when he found that the two men occasionally spent the night together at White’s elegant Georgetown home. White, a flamboyant dresser and Washington wit, was a member of the American Ordnance Association, a pro-defense lobby with close ties to the War Department. Friendly with several senators and congressmen, White frequently invited the great and the good to his house in Acapulco and seemed to know everyone in government. The question was, how many of them were homosexuals, too? Thornton Cole made it his mission to find out.
It was usually only on weekends that Cole found the time to indulge his peculiar hobby. Unmarried, but conducting an affair with another man’s wife, he was used to loitering in dark doorways and watching someone’s house from a parked car. This particular Sunday, an unseasonably warm night and hardly like any Halloween he could recall, Cole followed Lovell White to the Hamilton Hotel, which overlooked Franklin Park, a notorious meeting place for homosexuals.
In the bar of the hotel, Cole had spied Lovell White deep in conversation with a man whose face, if not his name, Cole remembered as someone he had once or twice seen around Henry Stimson, the secretary of war. Another potential homosexual in the War Department was better than he had expected, and, debating how next to proceed—should he contact Hoover at the FBI?—Thornton Cole wandered into the park itself, to contemplate his next move.
But while Lovell White’s liaison was illicit, it was not illicit in a homosexual way. Lovell White was indeed a homosexual, but the man with him was no invert but Brutus. White, an experienced agent, had already noticed that he was being followed and had detailed Agent Diego, whose real name was Anastasio Pereira, the Abwehr’s South American agent, to watch his back. Pereira had seen Thornton Cole follow White from the spy’s home in Georgetown and, realizing that the identity of Brutus might now be compromised, he tailed Cole into Franklin Park and approached him, asking for a light.
Despite his Hooverish interest in uncovering homosexuals in government, Cole was quite unaware of the park’s reputation and regarded Pereira’s approach without alarm.
“It’s a fine evening,” Pereira observed, catching up with Cole. “At least it would be if I didn’t think my wife was in that hotel with another man.”
“I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Not as sorry as they’re going to be when I surprise them.”
Cole smiled thinly. “And what are you going to do?”
“Kill them both.”
“You’re joking.”
Pereira shrugged. “What would you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where I come from there is no other way.” By now Pereira was satisfied of two things: that Cole was alone and that he was not a cop or an FBI agent. Everything about Thornton Cole looked tailor-made, and his long, thin hands were not those of a policeman—perhaps a musician’s or an academic’s. Whoever this man was, he was certainly not a professional. “I am from Argentina.” In the darkness, Pereira retrieved a switchblade from his coat pocket and snapped it open. “And there we stab a man who screws your wife.”
Even as he uttered the words, Pereira plunged the knife into Cole’s body just beneath the sternum. It was an expert blow delivered by a man who’d killed before with a knife, and it penetrated Cole’s heart. He was dead before he hit the ground.
Pereira dragged the body into some bushes, wiped his knife on the dead man’s coat, and pocketed his wallet. Then he lifted the hand that had inflicted the lethal wound to inspect his sleeve and, finding some blood on the cuff of his shirt, slipped off his jacket for a moment and rolled up his sleeve. After this, he put his jacket back on and walked back to the distinguished Renaissance Revival building that was the Hamilton Hotel. As he entered, he passed Brutus on his way out. The two men ignored each other. In the light of the lobby Pereira checked himself for bloodstains and, finding none, wandered down to the bar where he knew Lovell White would be waiting for him.
Pereira, dark and handsome, could not have looked less like the short, fat, balding man with glasses who, seeing the Argentinean appear in the hotel bar, waved a waiter toward him and ordered two dry martinis. From the expression on Pereira’s face, he judged that he might need one.
“Well?” asked White as Pereira sat down.
“You were right. You were being followed.”
“Did he see me with our friend?”
“Yes, he saw you both. I’m certain of it.”
“Shit. That’s fixed us.”
“Relax. Everything is fixed.”
“Fixed? What do you mean, fixed?”
“The man who followed you is now dead. That’s what I mean.”
“Dead? Where? Jesus Christ. Who was he?”
Pereira picked up the Washington Post from the banquette where Lovell White was sitting and perused the front page coolly. “So, Il Duce is believed to be in Italy again,” he said.
“Never mind that for now,” whispered White. “What do you mean, he’s dead?”
“No, he’s in Italy. It says so right here, my friend.”
Lovell White grimaced and looked away. Sometimes Pereira was just a little too relaxed for his own good; but he knew there was no point in hurrying the Argentinean; he would explain only when he was good and ready. The waiter came back with the drinks, and Pereira drank his in two large gulps.
“I need another,” he said.
“Here, have mine. I don’t want it. And you look like you need it.”
Pereira nodded. “I followed him across to the park and stabbed him. Don’t worry. He’s tucked up for the night in some bushes. I don’t think anyone will find him until morning.”
“Well, who the hell was he?”
> Pereira placed Thornton Cole’s wallet on the table. “You tell me,” he said.
White snatched the wallet off the table and opened it on his lap. A moment or two passed as he examined the contents. “Jesus Christ, I know this guy,” he said at last.
“Knew,” said Pereira, beginning his second martini.
“He’s from the State Department.”
“I didn’t think he was a cop.” Pereira took out a gold cigarette case and lit a Fleetwood. “Too Ivy League to be a cop.”
White rubbed his fleshy chin nervously. “I wonder if he was on to us. If he told anyone else about me.”
“I don’t think so. He was on his own.”
“How can you be sure about that?”
“Do you think I’d be sitting here now if he were working with someone else?” said Pereira.
“No, I guess not.” White shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why would Thornton Cole be following me?”
“Perhaps he was queer for you.”
“Very funny.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
“The question is, what are we going to do about this?”
“Do?” Pereira grinned. “I think I’ve done everything that can be done, don’t you?”
“Oh, no. No, no, no. You don’t just murder someone from the U.S. State Department and expect it to be treated like an ordinary street killing. There will be a major inquiry. In which case it’s possible the Metro police might find something that will explain why Cole was tailing me.” He nodded thoughtfully. “On the other hand, maybe there’s a way we can close down this investigation before it even gets started. To cripple an inquiry from the very outset.”
“Is there such a way?”
White stood up. “Finish that drink and show me where you left the body. We have to make this look like the real thing. To dress the set, so to speak.”
The two men walked out of the hotel.
“So why do queers come here and not somewhere else?”
“They have to go somewhere,” said White. “But maybe they come here for sentimental reasons. Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy, used to live just off this square. But the truth is, I don’t know. Who knows how these things get started?”
Pereira showed him where Thornton Cole’s body was hidden, and for a moment White stared at the corpse with something close to fascination. He had never before seen a dead body, and in the darkness Cole looked hardly dead at all.
“Come on,” urged Pereira. “Do whatever the fuck you’re going to do and let’s get out of here.”
“All right.” He pocketed the money from Cole’s wallet and tossed it on the ground beside the body. Then he took a book of matches and a ticket from Rigg’s Turkish Bath on Fifteenth and G Streets from his own vest pocket and slipped them into Cole’s pockets. The matchbook was from a private club in Glover Park and, like the Turkish bath, was well-known to the police as a haunt of Washington’s homosexual community.
Bending over the body, he undid Cole’s fly buttons.
“What the hell are you doing?” hissed Pereira.
“Just keep a look out and shut up.” White pulled the dead man’s penis out of his pants. “I know what I’m doing. This kind of thing happens all the time, believe me. And I already told you about the reputation of this park. By the time I’ve finished here, this is going to be one investigation they’re going to want to keep very quiet.” White undid his own fly buttons. The way he saw it, Thornton Cole’s murder was going to make the Sumner Welles scandal look like a Sunday school picnic.
Taking out his own penis, he began to masturbate.
THE OSS OCCUPIED a complex of four redbrick buildings at 2430 E Street, on the corner of Twenty-third Street and the Foggy Bottom bank of the Potomac River. When the OSS had moved into the E Street building, they discovered two dozen monkeys—medical research subjects—that the National Institutes of Health had left behind, and this had prompted Radio Berlin to remark that FDR had a team working for him that included fifty professors, twenty monkeys, and a staff of Jewish scribblers.
At the time I didn’t think the Germans were so very far from the truth. I was impressed that they should have known as much about the OSS as evidently they did. Especially the bit about the monkeys.
Further along E Street a brewery lent the air a strong, pungent smell that prompted me to remember all that was sour in my life. I was one of Roosevelt’s Jewish scribblers. The only trouble was I felt like one of the monkeys. A monkey deprived of a tree to swing in and without a banana.
I had tried telephoning Diana on a number of occasions but her maid, Bessie, said she wouldn’t take my calls. Once, in an effort to trick her into coming to the phone, I even pretended to be one of her decorating clients, but by then Bessie was easily able to recognize my voice. Her friends avoided me, too, as if I had caused her some hurt, and not the other way around. Soon, I took to driving by her house in Chevy Chase at all hours of the day and night, but Diana’s car was never there. What made things worse was that she still hadn’t given me any kind of explanation for her behavior to me. The injustice of what had happened seemed almost as hard to bear as the heartache. My situation began to feel hopeless. But there seemed to be nothing else that I could do for the moment and, after all, there was still a war on. I had a job to do.
In fact it wasn’t much of a job. I wished that when Allen Dulles had gone off to Switzerland to head up the OSS office in Berne, I had gone with him. But for a fever, I might have. Instead of which I remained behind in Washington, distracted by memories of Diana, and chafing under the leadership of Donovan’s number two, Otto Doering.
Now that my report on the Katyn Forest massacre had been turned in to the president, I had settled back to my original job. I was spending some of my time devising a plan for finding the German spy who had reported on the existence of those twenty monkeys. I was sure he was based in Washington, and I had planted a number of false facts with several different local organizations before carefully monitoring which of these was reported on Radio Berlin or appeared in a speech by some leading Nazi. So far, I had narrowed the search to someone in the War Department.
Some of my time was spent compiling personal data on the leading figures in the Third Reich. This could be very personal indeed, such as the rumor that SD chief Walter Schellenberg was screwing the widow of his old boss, Reinhard Heydrich; or that Heinrich Himmler was obsessed with spiritualism; and what exactly had happened after Hitler had been treated for hysterical blindness by a psychiatrist at a military hospital in 1918.
But most of the time I worked on setting up an American-supported German resistance movement. Unfortunately it had turned out that several members of this popular front were German Communists, and this had brought them, and to some extent me, under the scrutiny of the FBI. So when two mugs wearing cheap shiny suits and carrying short-barreled .38s where their hearts ought to have been presented themselves in front of my desk that Monday afternoon, I assumed the worst.
“Professor Willard Mayer?”
“Look,” I said, “if you’ve come to ask me more questions about Karl Frank and the Popular Front, I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can add to what you Feds already know.”
One of the men shook his head and took out some ID in his leatherlike sixteen-ounce paw. As I leaned in to take a squint at it, I caught the rank smell of sweat on his frayed shirt and the liquor on his breath. He was too grimy for FBI, I realized. Too grimy and all too human. He had a face ingrained with disbelief and a belly like the heavy bag at Stillman’s. I could have hit him all day and he’d still have been blowing smoke rings from the cheap cigar in the corner of his mouth.
“We’re not Feds,” he said. “We’re from the Metro Police Department, First Precinct on Fourth Street. I’m Lieutenant Flaherty and this is Sergeant Crooks. We’re here to ask you about Thornton Cole.”
“Thornton Cole? Last time I looked he was working for the State Department.”
�
��Last time?” said Flaherty. “When was that?”
“A month ago. Maybe longer.”
“What did he do there?” asked Crooks. The sergeant was smaller than his lieutenant, but not much. His green eyes were quicker, perhaps more skeptical, too, and when they narrowed I felt their shoemaker’s awl effect on the front of my head.
“He worked at the German desk. Analyzing German newspapers, propaganda, intelligence—anything that might aid our understanding of what the Germans are thinking. Basically the same thing I do here.”
“Is that how you come to know him well?”
“I wouldn’t say we know each other all that well. We don’t send each other a card at Christmas, if that’s what you mean. Look, Lieutenant, what’s this about?”
Flaherty pressed his belly hard as if he might have an ulcer. It wasn’t enough to gain my sympathy.
“Any idea what Cole gets up to in his private life?”
“ ‘Gets up to’? No, I have no idea. For all I know he has a hammock above his desk and a private life that’s built around a stamp collection. As I said, our acquaintance is limited to work. Now and then I’ll send something his way, and now and then he’ll send something to me. Usually it arrives in a nice big brown envelope with the words ‘Top Secret’ printed on the corner, just so that I know not to leave it on the bus. It’s that and the occasional hello at the Metropolitan Club.”
“What kind of ‘something’ did you send each other?”
I smiled a patient sort of smile, but I was beginning to feel like Flaherty’s ulcer. “Gentlemen. I’m sure you could beat it out of me in sixty seconds flat, but you must know that his work, like mine, is classified. I’d need the permission of my superiors to answer that question. Assuming you could find one of my superiors. It’s a little early for some of the white-shoe boys that run this place. I’d like to be of assistance. But right now you’re asking the wrong questions. If I knew what this was about, then I might be able to provide some answers you could exercise your pencils on.”
