by Philip Kerr
“Thornton Cole was found dead early this morning,” said Lieutenant Flaherty. “In Franklin Park. He’d been murdered. Stabbed once through the heart.”
Funny thing: whereas I merely felt that I had been stabbed through the heart, Thornton Cole really had been. The poor bastard. I tried to convince myself that I almost envied him, but it didn’t work. Diana had been right about that much, anyway. I did love myself—at least enough not to want to be dead on her account.
“Frankly, the case looks open-and-shut,” said Crooks. “But we have to go through the motions. I mean the guy had been robbed, and—”
“We went to his house,” said Flaherty, interrupting Crooks quickly. “On Seventeenth Street? We found your name in his address book.”
“Oh, right.” I lit a cigarette. “So what did you do, open it at random? The address book. What happened to A through L?”
“We divided it up into four sections,” said Flaherty.
“Fair enough. But surely the people at State would have a better idea of what he was up to than me.”
“The thing is, nearly all his superiors are in Moscow,” said Crooks. “With Cordell Hull. The secretary of state is attending some kind of conference there with the British and the Chinese.”
I shrugged. “I rather doubt his murder could be related to anything he was working on. I mean, his work was secret, but it wasn’t at all hazardous. I don’t think.”
The two detectives nodded. “That’s what we thought,” said Crooks.
“We just came from H Street,” said Flaherty. “Someone at the Metropolitan Club said you once introduced Cole to Sumner Welles. Is that right?”
“That was quite a while ago. And I fail to see the relevance.”
Flaherty took off his hat and rubbed his head. “It’s probably not relevant at all. We’re just trying to build a picture of the kind of society in which the late Mr. Cole moved. What sort of a man was he?”
I shrugged. “Intelligent. Good German speaker. Hardworking.”
“Any idea why he wasn’t married?”
“No. But I don’t see what that could tell you. I’m not married, either,” I replied. Nor likely to be, I told myself.
“Any idea what he might have been doing in Franklin Park, sometime around midnight?”
“I really can’t imagine. It was a warm night. And it was Halloween. Maybe that’s relevant.”
“A trick-or-treat that went wrong?” Crooks shook his head and smiled. “That’s some trick you’re suggesting. A knife through the heart.”
“I don’t know that I’m suggesting anything, gentlemen. But there were some high spirits in evidence around town last night.”
“How do you mean, high spirits?”
“Didn’t you see the paper? Someone smashed the nose off the Statue of Justice.”
“Is that a fact?”
“I can’t see how they might be connected. But, then, I’m not a detective. Although it seems to me that if I were, I’d probably look to try and connect the unusual, and to rob unusual things of their isolation, so to speak. Isn’t that the essence of detective work? The search for a sense of meaning? A truth concealed? A truth that exists behind the facade? The idea that something can be known?”
Flaherty looked at Crooks, uncomprehending.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about, sir,” he said.
“Forgive me,” I shrugged. “It’s my job to think counternaturally, so to speak. To challenge various presuppositions and beliefs and to question certain assumptions and perceptions. You think you’re looking for answers, but the truth is that really you’re just looking for the right question. As I said before.”
Flaherty lit a cigarette and winced as tobacco smoke flooded his eye momentarily.
“Did he have any hobbies you know of ?” asked the detective.
“Hobbies? I don’t know. No, wait. I seem to recollect he was very fond of the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” When the two cops looked blankly back at me, I added, “Sherlock Holmes?”
“Oh, right, Sherlock Holmes. I listened to it last night,” confessed Flaherty. “On WOL?” He smiled. “Solving a murder is easy when you’re Sherlock Holmes. But it’s not so easy when you’re just a Washington cop.”
“Yes,” I said. “I can believe that.”
Flaherty handed me his card.
“If you think of anything.”
I nodded, resisting the temptation to tell him that I was a philosopher and that I thought of things all the time. I only wished I could have thought of a way of persuading Diana to take me back.
XI
WEDNESDAY, NOVEMBER 10, 1943,
WASHINGTON, D.C.
WHEN I ARRIVED at the White House that evening, I was again sent to wait in the Red Room. I was beginning to feel quite at home there, although blue might have suited my mood a little better. I tried not to look at the picture of the lady above the fireplace, the one who reminded me of Diana.
There was a matronly briskness about Mrs. Tully that surprised me, given the comparatively late hour, and even on the thick rugs and runners, the heels of her shoes sounded like a drumbeat. Smelling lightly of cologne and wearing a neat gray dress, she looked as if she had just started her day’s duties. I resisted the temptation to tease her again. A lot of the playfulness had gone out of me of late.
I found Roosevelt making cocktails, carefully stirring the martini jug with a long-handled spoon.
“I’ve been looking forward to this, Professor.”
“Me, too, sir.”
“I went to the airport today, to greet Mr. Hull on his return from Moscow. It’s a courtesy usually reserved only for visiting heads of state. Everyone is wondering why I did that. The fact is I wanted to make him feel and look important before I make him look and feel quite the opposite.”
Roosevelt handed me a martini and, holding the jug between his thighs, wheeled himself over to the sofa, where I was now seated. We toasted each other silently. I didn’t like the president’s way with a martini any more now than before, but it was full of alcohol and that was all that really mattered.
Encouraged by the president’s confidential manner, I felt bold enough to make an observation. “You sound like you’re planning to fire him, sir.”
“Not fire. Just neglect. Hurt his pride a little. That kind of thing. I expect you’ve heard of the coming Big Three summit. Stalin and Churchill will bring their two foreign ministers, of course. But not me. I’m taking Harry Hopkins. Mr. Hull is going to stay behind and clean up his own backyard. At least that’s what I’m going to tell him. Moscow was Hull’s big chance at real diplomacy, and he fucked it up. That joint four-power declaration about unconditional surrender and trials for war criminals? Window dressing. I didn’t send Hull all that way to state the obvious. I wanted a meeting with Stalin at Basra. Know where that is?”
I had an idea Basra was more likely to be in the Middle East than in Wyoming, but exactly where in the Middle East I couldn’t say. The geography of sand dunes and wadis was never my strongest subject.
“It’s in Iraq. The good thing about Basra is that I could have gotten to it by ship. There’s a constitutional requirement that the president should not be away from Washington for longer than ten days. Hull’s job was to try and make Uncle Joe understand that. But he screwed up. Welles could have done it. He was a real diplomat. But Hull.” Roosevelt shook his head. “He understands the Tennessee timber business and not much else. Born in a log cabin, you know. Nothing wrong with that, mind. In fact, I had hoped his being a kind of American peasant would help him find some common ground with Stalin, only it didn’t work out that way. Stalin may be a peasant, but he’s a fucking clever peasant and I needed someone clever to deal with him. So now I have to go somewhere else for the Big Three, and I’m pretty pissed about it, I can tell you. Now I’m going to have to go by ship and by air.”
Roosevelt sipped his martini, and then licked his lips with satisfaction.
“You heard ab
out this fellow Thornton Cole and what happened to him, I suppose?” he asked.
“That he’d been murdered? Yes, sir.” I frowned as I failed to see what Roosevelt was driving at.
“I see you don’t know the whole story.”
“I guess not.”
“Know what a Florence test is?”
“No, sir.”
“It’s something the forensic boys do, to test for seminal fluid. It seems that Thornton Cole’s trousers were covered in semen.”
I suddenly realized what the Metro police had been driving at with their questions about me introducing Sumner Welles to Cole at the Metropolitan Club. They must have suspected me of being involved in some kind of ring of Washington sissies. I had known several homosexual men in my time, mostly in Berlin and Vienna, and even one or two in New York. I held nothing against them just as long as they didn’t try to hold anything against me. What a man did in the privacy of his own circle of hell was no business of mine. At the same time, I could hardly believe what I was hearing. It was true what I had told the Metro police. I hadn’t known Thornton Cole all that well. But I wouldn’t ever have guessed that he was a homosexual any more than I was one myself.
“I made sure I was the first one to tell Hull all about it,” said Roosevelt, gleefully. “In the car, on the way back from the airport. You should have seen his face. It was priceless, just priceless. That’s what I meant when I said he should stay home and clean up his own backyard.” Roosevelt laughed cruelly. “The son of a bitch.”
I tried not to look shocked, but I could not help but feel a little taken aback at this display of presidential vindictiveness.
Roosevelt lit a cigarette and finally came to the point of my presence. “I read your report,” he said. “It was refreshingly pragmatic. For a philosopher, you’re quite the Realpolitiker.”
“Isn’t that the proper job of the intelligence officer? To separate the politics of reality from a policy founded upon the principles of justice and morality? And philosophically speaking, Mr. President, I can’t see much at all that’s wrong with that.”
“You’ll make a logical positivist out of me yet, Professor.” Roosevelt grinned. “But only in private. Realpolitik is like homosexuality. Best when it’s practiced behind closed doors.” Roosevelt sipped his cocktail. “Tell me something. Have you got a girlfriend?”
I tried to contain my irritation.
“Are you asking me if I’m homosexual, Mr. President?” I said through gritted teeth. “Because if you are, the answer is no. I’m not. And as a matter of fact I don’t have a girlfriend. But I did, until quite recently.”
“I don’t care what a man does in private. But when it becomes public it’s a different matter. You see how sex becomes the purest kind of Realpolitik there is?”
I lit a cigarette. I had a strong sense that the president was leading me somewhere a long way from Katyn Forest.
“Professor Mayer? I want you to come to the Big Three with me. As I told you, I’m taking Harry Hopkins instead of Hull. I guess you know that Harry’s been living here at the White House since 1940. There isn’t a man in Washington I trust more. He’s been with me through thick and thin, since ’32. But Harry has a problem. He gets sick. Much of his stomach was cut away because of cancer, and that makes it difficult for him to absorb protein.
“So I want you to understudy Harry and be ready to step into his shoes if he should become ill. Only I don’t want Harry to know about it. You understand? It will be our dirty little secret. People will ask why you’re along for the ride, and you’ll have to tell them to mind their own damned business. That will only make them more curious, of course, so we’ll have to devise some sort of official position for you. Executive officer to General Donovan, or something. But what do you say? Will you come?”
A trip to somewhere warm sounded nice, especially now that I was sleeping alone. And leaving Washington, going somewhere far away, might just help to bring Diana to her senses.
“Of course, sir. It would be an honor and a privilege. When do we leave?”
“Friday. It’s short notice, I know. You’ll need to get some shots. Yellow fever, typhoid, things like that. And we’ll be away for quite a while. At least another month. In Cairo we’ll hook up with Donovan. Meet the British and the Chinese. Then go on somewhere else for the conference with Stalin. I can’t tell you where that is yet. Only that it’s not Basra, more’s the pity.”
“I like a little mystery in my life.”
“I know you won’t be insulted if I say I hope I don’t have need of your counsel while we’re away. However, there’s something I’d like your opinion on right now.”
“Anything, Mr. President.”
Roosevelt stubbed out his cigarette, screwed another Camel into his holder, and lit it quickly, before fetching some papers from underneath a bronze ship’s steering clock on the untidy-looking desk.
“Your boss is inclined to be an enthusiast of all kinds of intelligence,” said Roosevelt. “Of whatever character and provenance. And quite regardless of appearances and the diplomatic niceties. Now, as you know, I strongly hold the view that the Russians are the key to the defeat of Germany. As soon as we came into this war, I decreed that there was to be no spying on the Russians, and on the whole we’ve stuck to that. More or less. However, this past February the War Department’s Military Intelligence Division, G-2, started examining Soviet diplomatic cablegrams in order to prove, or disprove, a persistent rumor we had been hearing that the Russians have been negotiating a separate peace with the Nazis.”
Roosevelt refilled our glasses. After two, the anesthetic effect of the gin kicked in and the president’s martinis didn’t taste half bad.
“In an effort to scotch the rumor, we managed to establish our own source in the Soviet embassy. And what has since become clear is that the Russians have a network of spies working right here in Washington. For example, here are a number of memos Donovan’s sent me that relate to tidbits of information we’ve had.”
Roosevelt adjusted the pince-nez on the bridge of his long nose, glanced over the memos he was holding, and then handed one to me.
“This first memo from Donovan speaks about a British intercept regarding an NKVD agent working here called ‘Nick’; and another one called ‘Needle.’ Apparently they had a meeting here in Washington just last week.” Roosevelt handed me another of Donovan’s memoranda. “This one talks about someone called ‘Söhnchen’ meeting an American called ‘Croesus.’ And in this one we have someone called ‘Fogel’ handing over some information to ‘Bibi.’ ”
Another log shifted noisily on the fire. This time it sounded a lot like my own doom.
“Your boss and G-2 think that this puts a completely different complexion on my original executive order about spying on Russia,” continued Roosevelt. “After all, if they’re spying on us, it kind of makes us look like chumps if we don’t try to find out more—for example, from those cablegrams between Moscow and Amtorg, the Soviet Trade Mission in New York, they’ve been examining. Not that they’ve had much luck, because the Soviets are using a two-part ciphering system that G-2 has regarded as unbreakable. Until now, that is. A week or two ago, in Cairo, Bill Donovan got hold of some Soviet duplicate onetime pads. And now he wants my permission to go ahead and decode all the recent radio traffic that we’ve been able to intercept. The code name for these signals intercepts is Bride.”
“And you want my opinion regarding what, exactly, sir?”
“Do I let the original executive order stand, or should I let G-2 and your General Donovan run with this?”
“Can I speak frankly, Mr. President? And in confidence?”
“Of course.”
I chose my words carefully. “I just wonder if we would be having this conversation at all if the Bride material related to British signals traffic. The Soviets are also our allies, after all. They might be a little pissed at us if they found out.”
“Wait a minute. Are you suggesting that
the British are spying on us, too?”
“I don’t know that I would call it spying, exactly, sir. But they do act on the wish to know more than we tell them.”
“I call that spying,” frowned Roosevelt.
“Whatever you call it, sir, it happens. It’s the same with the Russians. I think the reality is that the Soviets are just as nervous that we will make a separate peace with the Germans as we are that they will do the same. Especially in the wake of the Katyn Forest massacre.”
“That’s a fair point.”
“And another thing,” I said, gathering confidence. “Even while we speak, there are Russians here in Washington quite legitimately to learn about the equipment we’re sending them as lend-lease. It’s hard to know what they could spy on that we aren’t already prepared to tell them.”
Roosevelt remained silent, and I realized that if there were secrets, he wasn’t likely to confirm or deny this.
“Besides, isn’t the point of your meeting with Stalin to demonstrate your goodwill toward each other?”
“Of course it is.”
“Then suppose they found out we were spying on them? Analyzing their signals traffic. Ahead of the Big Three. How would that look?”
“That, of course, is my major concern. It would ruin everything.”
“Frankly, sir, I can’t imagine why you’re even contemplating it. But there is another factor that perhaps you might not be aware of. Only I shouldn’t like General Donovan to know I told you.”
“This conversation never took place,” said Roosevelt.
“The most vital intelligence sources are the decrypted transcripts known as Magic and Ultra.”
“I couldn’t comment on that, either,” said Roosevelt.
