by Philip Kerr
“Why would anyone want to kill Debbie Schmidt?” asked Bohlen.
“Because Debbie Schmidt had been having an affair with someone,” I explained. “That’s what Ted told me, anyway. Only Ted told someone else, as well. Someone aboard the Iowa. I think that someone killed him. I think the murderer also tricked his way into the radio room on board the ship and sent a message back to the States. My guess is that the message contained Mrs. Schmidt’s home address and a request to get rid of her.”
Bohlen was frowning. “He said as much to me when he was in Moscow for the conference. That she was having an affair.”
“Ted was in Moscow? With Cordell Hull?”
Bohlen nodded.
“I didn’t know that.”
“He was drinking a bit too much—well, it’s hard not to when you’re with the Soviets—and he said he had his suspicions then. He didn’t say who it was. Only that I knew the man. And that it was someone in the State Department.”
“Did he tell you who it was?” Reilly asked me.
“Yes, he did.” I could see no reason now to keep any of this a secret any longer. Certainly not now that the police were involved in both Washington and Cairo. “It was Thornton Cole.”
I waited for their expressions of surprise to subside. Then I said: “The fact that Deborah Schmidt was pregnant by Cole only seems to make it much less likely he could have been looking for homosexual sex when he was murdered in Franklin Park.”
“I see what you mean,” said Reilly.
“I’m glad someone does. I was beginning to think I just had a dirty mind. Ted and I talked this over. We both concluded that in the wake of the Sumner Welles scandal, whoever murdered Cole wanted to make sure it would be swept under the rug as quickly as possible. So the murderer made Cole’s death look as if he’d been having sex with a man in a public place. Given that Cole worked on the German desk at State, it’s possible he was on the trail of some kind of Washington spy ring.”
“Why didn’t you come forward with this information before?” demanded Reilly.
“With respect, you weren’t on the ship, Mr. Reilly,” said Hopkins, coming to my defense. “The professor here was hardly the most popular man on the Iowa when he suggested that Schmidt might have been murdered, and that there was a German spy on board.”
“Besides,” I said, “I could hardly be sure that whoever I told wasn’t the person who killed Schmidt. In which case I might have been murdered, too.” I paused a moment. “Last night I damn nearly was.”
“What?” Hopkins glanced at the other two men. They looked as astonished as he did.
“Murdered.”
“You don’t say,” he breathed.
“I do say. Underlined and in italics. Someone took a shot at me last night. Fortunately for me it missed. Unfortunately for someone else, it didn’t. There’s a body in Ezbekiah Gardens right now that should be me.” I lit a cigarette and sat down in an armchair. “I figure whoever killed the Schmidts wants to kill me as well. Just in case Ted told me about Thornton Cole.”
“Are the police involved?” asked Reilly.
I smiled. “Of course the police are involved. Even in Cairo they know to look for someone with a gun when they find a man lying in the park with a bullethole between his eyes.” I inhaled sharply. I was almost enjoying their horror. “The police just aren’t involved with me, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t hang around the crime scene. I tend not to when someone has fired a shot at me. With a silencer.”
“A silencer?” Hopkins looked puzzled.
“You know—the little gizmo you put on the end of your gun to make it go phut phut instead of bang bang. Very useful when you want to make sure you don’t disturb people while they’re watching a movie.” I shrugged. “There was that, and I also thought it best if the president’s delegation stayed out of the picture, for now.”
“You did the right thing,” said Reilly.
I nodded. “At least until someone tries again. Our German agent, perhaps. If that’s who it was.”
“So why talk now?” asked Reilly. “To us?”
“Because neither you nor Bohlen here were on the ship, of course. Ergo, you couldn’t have done it. As for Mr. Hopkins, I hardly think that the president’s best friend is likely to be a German spy. I’ve played gin rummy with him. He’s not that good a bluffer. No one in this room could possibly be involved.”
Hopkins was nodding, good-humoredly.
“So what do you want us to do now?” asked Reilly. “After all, it’s possible this German spy might be planning an attempt on the president’s life.”
“I don’t think so. An assassin hardly lacked for an opportunity to kill Roosevelt when we were still on board ship. It’s safe to assume that our spy has something else in mind. Perhaps—and this is only a guess—perhaps he’s not an assassin at all. Perhaps the Germans want their own man in Teheran. To take the measure of the alliance. To see if there’s any room for future diplomatic maneuver. I can give you all kinds of reasons if I sit here long enough.”
“Do we tell the president?” Hopkins asked. “Mike?”
Mike Reilly had a look on his face that suggested he’d hit a brick wall. I kicked his thought processes aside and pressed on with my own. “For now I’d like to keep this between the four of us. Perhaps the Metro Police in D.C. will turn up something more that will help us get a lead on this guy.”
“Under the circumstances, this might be a job for the FBI. What do you say, Mike?”
“I’m inclined to agree, sir.”
Reilly’s brain. You could almost see it jerking around in his skull, as if Hopkins had tapped it with a small reflex hammer. I smiled, trying to contain my irritation with them both.
“That’s your call. But my feeling would be not to mention this to anyone until we know a little more. We wouldn’t want to spook anyone. Especially the president.”
“It sounds to me as though you might already suspect someone,” said Reilly.
I had obviously thought about this. There was John Weitz, who had threatened to kill Ted Schmidt. And there were some of Reilly’s colleagues in the Secret Service. On the night he disappeared from the Iowa, Schmidt had asked the chief petty officer to direct him to the Secret Service quarters. Could one of them have lured him up on deck to kill him? Disliking almost all of them, I was finding it hard to fix on one particular suspect. Agent Rauff had a name he shared with a Gestapo commander. Agent Pawlikowski looked like one of Hitler’s blond beasts. And hadn’t Agent Qualter expressed what seemed to be the popular view, that Stalin was as bad as Hitler? Killing Stalin, killing Roosevelt, killing the Big Three, or just trying to take the measure of the alliance—there was no shortage of possible motives for a German spy among our number.
“Maybe,” I told Reilly. “Maybe not. But I’d still like to keep the lid on this for a while. In the hope that our man might reveal himself. Getting the FBI involved might prevent that from happening.”
“All right,” agreed Reilly. “We’ll do it your way, Professor. But just in case, we’ll double the detail guarding the president.”
“Keep us posted, Professor,” Hopkins told me as I went out the door. “If there are any developments, let us know immediately.”
“If someone shoots me, you’ll know I wasn’t exaggerating,” I told him.
I went back outside to my car. All that talk about a German spy had prompted me to recall my own secretly precarious situation. It was time I checked to see how Major Reichleitner was coming along with Donovan’s Bride.
“Where to, boss?” asked Coogan.
“Grey Pillars.”
I had left a five-pound note with the duty corporal to provide cigarettes, medicine, and some decent food and water for the prisoner. Entering the cell, I found the major much recovered and working diligently on Donovan’s Bride material. Thanking me for the extra supplies, he told me he was making excellent progress with the signals transcripts and he might have some plaintexts to show me by the end
of the week.
“Good. Sounds as though it will be just in time. We’re flying to Teheran on Saturday morning.”
“So it is Teheran. But don’t they know? The place is full of German sympathizers.”
I shrugged. “I tried telling them. But I’m beginning to suspect FDR thinks he walks on water.”
“On water, no,” said Reichleitner. “But on oil, perhaps. If they’re having the conference there it’s because they’ll all be trying to get the shah to commit to a cheap oil price, in perpetuity.”
“Maybe he can give me a good deal on a rug while he’s at it.”
“By the way. Did you give Roosevelt the Beketovka File?”
“Not yet.” What with seeing Elena again, and being shot at, I had forgotten all about the file now lying on a table in my hotel room. “I’m still trying to get some time with the president so I can bring it to his attention.”
“But you’ve read it yourself.”
“Of course,” I said, thinking I could hardly say I hadn’t and still retain the German’s goodwill. I resolved to try to read the file the moment I got back to Shepheard’s.
“And what do you think?”
“It’s shocking. I think it confirms what a lot of people in this city seem to believe already. That Stalin is as great a threat as Hitler.”
Reichleitner nodded his approval. “He is. He is.”
“To be honest with you, though, I’m not sure it’s going to have much of an immediate influence on Roosevelt. After all, he managed to ignore all the evidence about Katyn.”
“But this time the numbers are so much greater. It’s evidence of a pattern of mass murder and neglect on an industrial scale. If Roosevelt can make an alliance with a man like Stalin, then there’s no reason why he couldn’t make a deal with Hitler himself.”
I nodded uncomfortably. I wondered what Max Reichleitner would have said if I had told him what Donovan had told me: that FDR was indeed pursuing an American peace with Hitler. I told myself he wouldn’t have believed a word of it.
When I got back to Shepheard’s, I picked up the Beketovka File, feeling guilty about the lie I had told. I moved the armchair near the open window, but in the shade. I put a package of cigarettes on the side table next to a cold beer, my notebook, and my fountain pen. Then I dived in. It was a like diving into a dark pond to find that there was something unseen just beneath the opaque surface, like a rusty iron bedstead. The hidden object was a monograph by Heinrich Zahler. I hit my head on it. Hard.
My name is Heinrich Zahler and I was a lieutenant in the 76th Infantry Division of the German 6th Army that surrendered to the Soviets on January 31, 1943. I was born in Bremen, on March 1, 1921, but I don’t expect to live to see Bremen again or, for that matter, my next birthday. I am writing now in the hope that this secretly written letter (if these writing materials are discovered, I will be executed immediately) will reach my parents. My father, Friedrich, works for the docks and harbor board in Bremerhaven, and my mother, Hannah, is a midwife at the University Hospital in Bremen. I want to tell them how very much I love them both and to abandon any hope of ever seeing me again. Death is the only escape from this, the deepest pit in hell.
Attempts to take POWs out of Stalingrad began immediately after we surrendered, when the Popovs had tired of beating us. But almost all the rolling stock was required to supply the Russian front at Rostov, and so most of us were obliged to march to the camp where we are now imprisoned. Some were loaded into cattle-trucks awaiting the arrival of a steam locomotive that never came, and after a week the cars were opened again and it was discovered that all of the men inside, some 3,000 officers and private personnel, were dead. But thousands more died of typhus, dysentery, frostbite, and wounds received in the battle before they could even leave the provisional POW camp at Stalingrad. In retrospect, they were the lucky ones.
The march to the camp that was to be our final destination took five days. We walked in all weathers, without food or water or any kind of shelter. Those who could not walk were shot or clubbed to death, or sometimes just stripped and left to freeze to death. Many thousands more died on the march here. And perhaps they were lucky, too.
This is the largest of the Russian POW camps—Camp Number 108, at Beketovka. It is what the Russians call a katorga. That means hard labor, low rations, and no medical attention other than that which we can provide for ourselves, which is very little. The site of the camp was formerly a school, but it is hard to believe that children could ever have been educated in such a place as this. The school was partly destroyed during the battle for Stalingrad, which means that there are no windows, no doors, and no beds; there is no roof or furniture of any kind; anything made of wood was burned long ago to provide heat for Red Army soldiers. The only fuel we have is our own dried human feces. We sleep on the floor, without blankets, huddled together for warmth in temperatures as low as -35 degrees centigrade.
When we arrived, there was no food or water, and many men died from eating snow. After two days they gave us a kind of watery bran that a horse or a dog would have ignored; even today, months after our arrival, none of us eats more than a few ounces of bread a day—if bread is what it is: this bread has more grit in it than the soles on a roadworker’s boots. Sometimes, as a special treat, we boil potato peelings for soup, and whenever we can, we smoke the dust off the floor—a Russian solution to the problem of the lack of tobacco, which they call “scratch.” Every morning when we pick ourselves off the floor we discover that as many as fifty of us have died during the night. A week after my arrival here I awoke to find that Sergeant Eisenhauer, a man who saved my life on more than one occasion, was dead and frozen hard to the ground, and hardly recognizable, for the rats feast on the extremities of the dead in the short time that remains before they become petrified with cold. It is not just the rats that eat human flesh in this place, however. Sometimes bodies disappear and are cooked and eaten. The cannibals among us are easily spotted by their healthier pallor and shunned by the rest of us. Otherwise, the morning always starts with bodies dragged out of the building where we sleep and, to ensure that death has not been feigned, the Popovs drive a metal spike into the skull of each corpse with a hammer. The clothes are then stripped off the body, any gold fillings removed with pliers and (for several months, until the ground unfroze) the bodies laid out on the styena—which is what the Popovs call the wall they have built from the naked corpses of our dead comrades.
Our guards are not soldiers, all of them are needed for the front, but the zakone, common criminals who were serving sentences in other labor camps and whose brutality and depravity know no limit. I believed that I had witnessed all of the evil that men were capable of inflicting upon one another during the battle for Stalingrad. That was before I came to Camp 108.
By the end of May, those of us who still remained alive at Beketovka were put to work rebuilding—first the camp itself, and then the local railway station. Winter had been bad, and many of us who survived it assumed that summer could only improve our lot—at least we would be warm. But with the summer came a heat that was no less intolerable than the cold. Worst of all were the mosquitoes. Whereas before I saw men stripped naked and forced to stand in the snow until they died (this is called oontar paydkant—“winter punishment”), now I see men bound naked to a tree and left to the mosquitoes until they screamed to be shot (this is called samap paydkant, “summer punishment”); sometimes they were shot, but mostly the mosquitoes were left to do their ghastly work, for a bullet is wasted on a German, say the zaks. In truth, however, I have seen my comrades die in all manner of revolting ways. A corporal from my own platoon was thrown into a cesspit and left to drown in excrement. His crime? He asked a zak for some water. A friend of mine, Helmut von Dorff, a lieutenant from the 6th Panzer Army, was executed for going to the assistance of a comrade who had fallen at work under the weight of the railway sleeper he was obliged to carry on his shrunken shoulder. The zaks tied von Dorff to a telegraph pole and
rolled it down a steep hill into the river Volga, where, presumably, he drowned.
Punishments other than death are rare indeed, but those that do exist are unusually cruel and often fatal anyway to men severely weakened by starvation, overwork, and dysentery. One man, so emaciated from lack of food his buttocks had virtually disappeared, was beaten on the bones of his behind until they were through the skin and flesh, and he died soon afterward from infection; but for the most part, beatings are so routine they hardly count as punishment, and the zaks like to devise new ways of enforcing their idea of discipline. This was the way they punished a Luftwaffe sergeant from the 9th Flak Division: they locked him inside a coffin-shaped box in which thousands of lice had been allowed to multiply and left him there for twenty-four hours; when they removed the lid, his body had swollen up so much from his bites that they could not pry him from the box and had to break off one side of it, much to the amusement of the zaks. Here is another: a staff officer from the 371st Infantry Division—I do not remember his name—they put a long piece of rope in his mouth, like a bridle, pulled the ends over his shoulders and tied them to his wrists and ankles; they left him on his stomach like that for a whole day, without water, and he has never walked since.
Morality has no meaning in a place like this. It is a word that does not exist in Beketovka, perhaps nowhere in all of Russia. Even so, there are times when I cannot help but think that we brought these misfortunes on ourselves by invading this country. Our leaders took us here and then abandoned us. And yet I am still proud to be a German and proud of the way we have conducted ourselves. I love my Fatherland but I fear what is to come, for if the Red Army were ever to conquer Germany, who knows what sufferings might be inflicted on our kith and kin? It does not bear thinking about.
