by Philip Kerr
The ship was just east of Bermuda on a moderate sea with pleasant weather. I was only feeling a little seasick. I trained my binoculars on the escort destroyers. The Iowa had been making twenty-five knots, but the three smaller destroyers—the Cogswell, the Young, and the Willie D. Porter—had found the pace hard going. I overheard Rear Admiral Brown telling the president that the Willie D. had lost power in one of its boilers.
“She’s not what you would call a lucky ship, is she?” observed the president.
Hearing a loud metallic clunking noise, I glanced down to see, immediately beneath me, one of the Iowa’s nineteen 40-millimeter guns being loaded. A little further to my right, in front of the first uptake, a sailor was manning one of the ship’s sixty 20-millimeter guns. The weather balloons were launched and a minute or so later, when these had achieved a sufficient altitude, the antiaircraft batteries began to fire. If I’d been deaf, I think I would still have complained about the noise. As it was, I was too busy covering my ears with both hands and remained that way until the last of the balloons had been hit, or had drifted out of range toward the escort destroyers. It was then I noticed something unusual to starboard and turned toward Admiral King, a tall, slim-looking man who resembled a healthier version of Harry Hopkins.
“The Willie D. Porter appears to be signaling, sir,” I said, when the noise had finally abated.
King trained his binoculars on the flashing light and frowned as he tried to decipher the Morse code.
“What do they say, Ernie?” asked the president.
I had already read the message. The training at Catoctin Mountain had perhaps been better than I remembered. “They’re telling us to go into reverse at full speed.”
“That can’t be right.”
“Sir, that’s what they’re signaling,” I insisted.
“Doesn’t make sense,” muttered King. “What the hell does that idiot think he’s playing at now?”
A second or two later all became frighteningly clear. On the underside of the flag bridge, immediately beneath our feet, an enormous public-address system burst loudly to life. “Torpedo on the starboard quarter. This is not a drill. This is not a drill. Torpedo on the starboard quarter.”
“Jesus Christ!” yelled King.
Roosevelt turned to the Negro valet standing behind him. “Wheel me over to starboard, Arthur,” he said with the air of a man asking for a mirror to see himself in a new suit. “I want to take a look for myself.”
Meanwhile Agent Rowley drew his pistol and leaned over the side of the flag bridge as if to shoot the torpedo. I might have laughed if the possibility of being hit amidships and sunk had not seemed so likely. Suddenly the previous evening’s predicament of the Porter’s man overboard seemed more immediate. Just how long could a man survive in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean? Half an hour? Ten minutes? Probably less than that if he was seated in a wheelchair.
The Iowa, taking evasive maneuvers, increased speed and began turning to port and, a long minute later, an enormous explosion threw up a mountain of water behind the battleship. The ship seesawed underfoot as if Archimedes had sat down in his bath and then got up again to answer the phone, and I felt the spray hit my face hard.
“Did you see that?” exclaimed the president. “Did you see that? It went straight by us. Couldn’t have been more than three hundred yards off our starboard side. My God, that was exciting. I wonder if it’s one sub or several.”
As a display of sangfroid, it ranked close to Jeanne d’Arc asking her executioner for a light.
“If it’s several, we’re screwed,” King said grimly and stormed his way to the bulkhead door, only to find Captain McCrea appearing on the flag deck in front of him.
“You’re not going to believe this, Admiral,” said McCrea. “It was the Willie D. that fired on us.”
Even as Captain McCrea spoke, the Iowa’s big 16-inch guns were turning ominously in the direction of the Willie D.
“Commander Walter broke radio silence to warn us about the fish,” continued McCrea. “I’ve ordered our guns to take aim at them just in case this is some kind of assassination plot.”
“Jesus Christ,” snarled King, and, taking off his cap, he rubbed his bald head with exasperation. Meanwhile, Generals Arnold and Marshall were making a hard job of not smirking at the now obvious discomfort of their rival service. “That fucking idiot.”
“What are your orders, sir?”
“I’ll tell you what my goddamn orders are,” said King. “Order the commander of the Porter to detach his fucking ship from the escort and make all speed for Bermuda. There, he is to place his ship and his whole fucking crew under close arrest pending a full inquiry into what just happened here today, and a possible court-martial. And you can tell Lieutenant Commander Walter personally from me that I consider him the worst fucking naval officer commanding a ship I’ve come across in more than forty years of service.”
King turned toward the president and replaced his cap. “Mr. President. On behalf of the navy, I should like to offer you my apologies, sir, for what has happened. But I can assure you that I intend to get to the bottom of this incident.”
“I think we all nearly got to the bottom,” Marshall said to Arnold. “The bottom of the ocean.”
Back in the cabin I found Ted Schmidt sitting crapulously on the edge of his bunk, wearing his life vest and clutching a new bottle of rye. What do you do with a drunken sailor, I asked myself wearily. Giving him a taste of the bosun’s rope end, shaving his belly with a rusty razor, and even putting him in bed with the captain’s daughter were, all of them, solutions that came musically to mind.
“What’s happening?” hiccuped Schmidt. “I heard firing. Are we under attack?”
“Only by our own side,” I offered, and explained what had happened.
“Thank God.” Schmidt collapsed back on his bunk. “It would be just my luck on top of everything else that’s happened to get killed by my own side.”
I took the bottle from Schmidt and poured myself a drink. After the cold air of the flying bridge I needed something warm inside of me. “Would you care to talk about it?”
Schmidt shook his head, miserably.
“Look, Ted, this has got to stop. Getting tight is one thing. Getting shit-faced is quite another. Maybe the Russians at the Big Three will forgive you smelling like a bootlegger’s glove, but I don’t think the president will. What you need is a shave and a shower to scrub the sideboard off your breath. Every time you whistle I swear I’m halfway up Mount Vernon. After that, we’ll go find you a cup of strong coffee and some fresh air. Come on. I’ll hold your toilet bag.”
“Maybe you’re right.”
“Sure I’m right. If this were dry land, I’d feel duty bound to smack you in the mouth and confine you to your cabin. But since this is a ship, we’ll say that you’re seasick. That’s a perfectly respectable thing to be at sea. Besides, there are men, sober men, in command of destroyers, who are more incapable than you, Ted.”
When Schmidt had cleaned himself up and changed his clothes, we went forward. Only one man was in the mess when we got there. He was a lean, athletic-looking man wearing a Yale bow tie, a V-necked pullover, and half-moon glasses. There was a knife-edge crease to his gray flannels. His hair was short and silvery, and in his hand was a book as thick as a car tire. It was titled The Fountainhead. He had a distant manner and seemed to view our arrival with all the enthusiasm of a courtier finding a dog turd inside the gates of the Forbidden City. Schmidt introduced him.
“This is John Weitz,” he said.
I nodded, smiling affably, but hardly liking this man at all. Weitz nodded back and sent up a small puff of smoke as if signaling that he wasn’t particularly friendly. Meanwhile, a mess attendant announced that he would fetch a fresh pot of coffee.
“John’s the other Russian specialist they’ve sent from State,” added Schmidt.
It was a remark that provoked some indignation in John Weitz. The first, I was to learn,
of a lot more where that had come from.
“Can you believe that?” Weitz said to me. “Can you? The most important diplomatic event of the century and just two of us from the State Department.”
Having already learned Harry Hopkins’s low opinion of State, I could believe it only too easily. And John Weitz seemed hardly the type to restore the reputation of the department in the eyes of Hopkins.
“It seems to me,” said Schmidt, “that the president has a dog but wants to wag the tail himself.”
Weitz nodded, angrily. This show of agreement between the two Russian specialists did not, however, extend to how the Soviet Union ought to be treated as an ally of the United States, and it wasn’t long before a heated discussion was under way. I kept out of it for the most part, not because I disliked political arguments but because it seemed to me there was something personal about this particular argument. Something that wasn’t quite explained by the simple fact that John Weitz was a shit.
“It sticks in my throat that the president is going to shake Stalin’s hand,” Weitz confessed.
“Why the hell shouldn’t the president shake Stalin’s hand?” Schmidt asked. “The Russians are our allies, for Christ’s sake. That’s what you do when you’ve made an alliance. You shake hands on it.”
“And it doesn’t bother you that Stalin signed the death warrant on ten thousand Polish officers? Some ally.” Weitz relit his pipe, but before the still hungover Schmidt could answer, he added, “Some ally, one that tries to make a separate peace with Germany. That’s the only reason there hasn’t been a Big Three before now.”
“Nonsense.” Schmidt was rubbing his eyes furiously.
“Is it? The Russian ambassador to Stockholm, Madame de Kollontay, has been practically sleeping with von Ribbentrop’s representative, Peter Kleist, since the beginning of the year.”
Schmidt looked at Weitz with contempt. “Bullshit.”
“I don’t think you understand the Russian mentality at all,” Weitz continued. “Let’s not forget that the Ivans have made a separate peace with the Germans before. In 1918, and again in 1939.”
“Maybe that’s true,” said Schmidt, “but things are very different now. The Russians have every reason to trust us.”
“Hey, I’m not saying they can’t trust us,” laughed Weitz. “The question is, can we trust them?”
“We promised Stalin a second front in 1942, and again in 1943, and look where we are now. There won’t be a second front before August of next year. How many more Red Army soldiers will die before then? A million? Stalin can be forgiven for thinking that he’s fighting this war by himself.”
“All the more reason, then, for him to negotiate a separate peace,” insisted Weitz. “It’s hard to imagine any country being able to sustain losses like that and want to go on fighting.”
“I might agree with you if the Red Army had lost the initiative. But they haven’t.”
Even as the two men argued, I had thought of a better reason why Stalin might just have been inclined to sue for peace: his greatest fear was not the Germans but the Russians themselves. He must have been terrified that his own army would mutiny against the appalling conditions and high casualties, just as it had in 1917. Stalin knew he was sitting on a powder keg. And yet what choice did he have?
John Weitz could only see the Soviet Union as a potential aggressor. “You mark my words,” he said. “Stalin is coming to this Big Three with a shopping list of countries he thinks he can occupy permanently without a shot being fired. And Poland is at the top of the list. If he thought that Hitler would agree to those demands, believe me, he’d make a deal with him even while he was shaking FDR’s hand. You ask me, we should let them both bleed white. Let the Nazis and Communists kill each other off and then pick up the pieces.”
By now the argument had grown very bad-tempered. And personal, too.
“Hell, it’s no wonder the Russians don’t trust us with bastards like you around,” yelled Schmidt.
“I think I’d rather be a bastard than an apologist for a murdering swine like Stalin. Who knows? Maybe you’re worse than that, Ted. You wouldn’t be the first fellow traveler at State.”
Schmidt stood up abruptly, his fists clenched and his soft, clean-shaven face quivering with anger. For a moment I thought that he would strike Weitz, and I and the two mess attendants who were on duty had to move quickly to intervene before actual blows were exchanged.
“You heard what he called me,” Schmidt protested to me.
“Looks like I hit a nerve,” grinned Weitz.
“Maybe you should shut up,” I suggested.
“And maybe you should be more careful about the company you keep,” replied Weitz.
“That’s good coming from you, you faggot,” said Schmidt.
Given the situation in the State Department—Sumner Welles, and then Thornton Cole—this was not an insult that John Weitz was likely to let pass, and before either I or the mess attendants could prevent him, he had punched Ted Schmidt hard on the nose—hard enough to make his nose bleed. He would have punched Schmidt again, too, but for the intervention of myself and one of the mess attendants.
“I’m going to kill him,” he yelled, repeating the threat several times.
“I’d like to see you try, you faggot,” grinned Schmidt, wiping his bleeding nose with his handkerchief.
The noise of this fracas brought Agents Rauff and Pawlikowski into the mess as Schmidt and Weitz continued to abuse and threaten each other.
“If you two gentlemen are supposed to be diplomats,” said Pawlikowski, pushing Weitz up against the cabin wall when he tried to hit Schmidt again, “then God help us all.”
Rauff looked at Schmidt and then at me. “I think you’d better get him out of here,” he said. “Before the president or any of the Joint Chiefs come in here.”
“Good advice,” I said, and took a firm hold of Schmidt’s arm and moved him smoothly toward the mess room door. “Come on, Ted,” I said. “He’s right. We don’t want the president seeing this. Let’s go back to the quarters.”
“He called me a faggot,” was the last thing I heard from Weitz as I closed the door behind us.
When we were back in the cabin, Schmidt sat down on his bunk and reached for his bottle.
“Don’t you think you’ve had enough of that stuff ?” I snapped. “What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway? And why on earth did you call Weitz a faggot?”
Schmidt shook his head and laughed. “I just wanted to get to him. Stick some mud on that Fascist bastard. People around State are kind of nervous about the possibility of there being some kind of organized pansy hunt. God forbid they should ever find a queer who’s also a Communist. They’d probably lynch him from the top of the Washington Monument.”
I had to admit there was some truth in that.
Schmidt was silent for a minute. Then he said, “Are you married, Willard?”
This struck a nerve as I remembered how the president and perhaps the Metro police had asked me the same thing.
“What, are you going to call me a faggot, too? Is that it?”
Schmidt looked pained. “Good Lord, no.” He shook his head. “I was just asking.”
“No, I’m not fucking married.” I shook my head bitterly. “I had a girl. A really nice girl. A girl I should have married. And now—well, now she’s gone. I’m not exactly sure why or even how, but I blew it.” I shrugged. “I miss her a lot. More than I thought possible.”
“I see.” Schmidt nodded. “Then we’re in the same boat.”
“Not for much longer if you carry on like you did just now. They’ll put you off at the next desert island.”
Schmidt smiled, his pudgy face a mixture of sympathy and irony. I didn’t much care for the sympathy, but the irony looked interesting.
“You don’t understand,” he said, taking off his glasses and cleaning them furiously. “The day before I came on this ship, my wife, Debbie, told me that she was going to leave me.�
� He swallowed hard and chipped me another twitching smile. It landed right on top of the large bag of self-pity I’d been carrying ever since coming on board the Iowa.
“I’m sorry.” I sat down and poured us both a drink. Short of fetching the ship’s chaplain, it seemed like the proper thing to do. “Did she say why?”
“She’s been having an affair. I guess if I’m honest, I knew she was up to something. She was always out somewhere. I didn’t want to ask, you know? In case my worst suspicions were confirmed. And now they are.”
He took the drink and stared at it as if he knew it wasn’t the answer. So I lit a cigarette and fed it between Schmidt’s lips.
“Do you know the other guy?”
“I did know him.” He smiled sheepishly as he caught my eye registering his use of past tense. “It’s a little more complicated than you might suppose. But I have to tell someone, I guess. Can you keep this to yourself, Willard?”
“Of course. You have my word.”
Schmidt swallowed the drink and then took a suicidally long drag on his cigarette.
“The other man is dead.” He smiled bitterly and added, “She’s leaving me for a dead man, Willard. Can you beat that?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t even get near to beating it. I didn’t even know the name of the guy I’d seen with Diana on the rug in her living room.
Schmidt snorted with laughter and then wiped tears from his eyes. “Not just any dead man, mind you. No, she had to pick the most infamous dead man in Washington.”
I frowned as I tried to figure out who Ted Schmidt could have been referring to. There was only one infamous dead man in Washington I could think of whom Ted Schmidt might have known. “Jesus, Ted, you don’t mean Thornton Cole.”
Schmidt nodded. “I do mean Thornton Cole.”
“But wasn’t he . . . ?”
“That’s what the Metro police said. I did some checking. They’re working on the assumption that Cole went to Franklin Park to have sex with a male prostitute, who then robbed and murdered him. But you can take it from me, Thornton Cole was certainly not homosexual.”
