by Philip Kerr
“I don’t think he’s angry.”
“No? I would be if someone stopped me from—” I smiled and started again, with the official version. “If someone had put a hole in my liver. How is he, anyway?”
“Stable.”
“Will he make it?”
“It’s too early to say. In themselves, most liver injuries are simple. Sepsis is the main postoperative problem. And rebleeding. And bile leaks.” Kaplan shrugged. “But he’s in good hands. I was a hepatologist at Cedars Sinai before the war. With anyone else but me I’d say his chances might not be so good.”
“Good to meet a man who still has faith in what he does.” I nodded. “I wish I could say the same.”
“Will you come?”
I stood up and collected my coat off the back of my door. As I put it on, I saw that there was still some blood on the sleeve. It was Pawlikowski’s blood, but I almost wished it had been mine.
I followed Kaplan out of the Quonset. He switched on a GI anglehead flashlight and led the way along some duckboards.
“What happened, anyway?” he asked. “Information is a little confused. Someone said that he tried to shoot the president.”
“No. That’s not true. I was there. I saw it happen. Nobody tried to shoot FDR.”
“So what happened?”
“It was an accident, that’s all. Around the president, I think that some of these Secret Service boys get a little trigger happy, that’s all.”
The lies had started.
John Pawlikowski was pale and asleep when I found him. There was a plasma drip in his arm and a couple of cannulae in his lower torso. He looked like a chemical plant.
Kaplan took Pawlikowski’s arm and squeezed it gently.
“Don’t wake him,” I said. “Let him sleep for now. I’ll sit with him awhile.”
The doctor pulled up a chair and I sat down.
“Besides, being in here gives me an excuse to leave that bottle alone. I take it alcohol is forbidden in here.”
“Strictly forbidden,” said Kaplan, smiling.
“Good.”
Kaplan went away to check on one of his other patients, and, clasping my hands, I leaned my elbows on Pawlikowski’s bed. Anyone who didn’t know me might have thought I was praying for him. And in a way I was. I was praying John Pawlikowski would wake up and tell me who he had been working for. So far I seemed to be the only member of the American delegation who wondered what kind of German spy it was that attempted to kill Adolf Hitler. I already had a few ideas on that one. But I was tired. It had been a long and stressful day followed by an alcohol-fueled evening and, after ten or fifteen minutes, I fell asleep.
I awoke with a start and the beginnings of a hangover, to hear the sound of a U.S. Military Police siren. Some kind of an emergency was on its way. Moments later, several cars drew up noisily outside the field hospital. Then the doors flew open and Roosevelt was wheeled inside on a hospital gurney, accompanied by Mike Reilly, Agents Rauff and Qualter, his physician, Admiral McIntire, and his valet, Arthur Prettyman. They were followed by several U.S. Army medical personnel, who quickly lifted Roosevelt onto a bed and began to examine him.
My head was clearer now. I went over to see what was happening.
The president did not look at all well; his shirt was wet through with perspiration, his face was deathly pale, and from time to time he was wracked with stomach cramps. One of the doctors attending him removed Roosevelt’s pince-nez and handed it to Reilly. The doctor was Kaplan. He straightened up for a moment and surveyed the melee of people around Franklin Roosevelt with obvious disapproval. “Will all those who are not medical personnel please step back? Let’s give the president some air.”
Reilly backed into me. He looked around.
“What the hell happened?” I asked.
He shook his head and shrugged. “The boss was hosting a dinner for Stalin and Churchill. Steak and baked potatoes cooked by the Filipino mess boys he brought on the trip. One minute he’s fine, talking about having access to the Baltic Sea or something, and the next he’s looking like shit. If he hadn’t already been sitting down in his chair, he’d have fainted for sure. Anyway, we wheeled him out of there and then McIntire decided we should bring him here. Just in case—”
Roosevelt twisted down on the bed again, holding his stomach painfully.
“Just in case he was poisoned,” continued Reilly.
“I guess anything’s possible after this morning.”
“The boss mixed the cocktails himself,” objected Reilly. “Martinis. The way he always does. You know, too much gin, too much ice. That’s all he drank. Churchill had one or two and he’s fine. But Stalin didn’t really touch his at all. He said it was too cold on the stomach.”
“Very sensible of him. They are.”
“It made me think—I don’t know what.”
“Either he just didn’t like them, or Stalin’s now afraid of being poisoned himself,” I said. “And consequently reluctant to drink anything that someone he doesn’t know has prepared.”
Reilly nodded.
“On the other hand . . .” I hesitated to say anything more.
“Let’s hear it, Professor.”
“I’m not an expert on these things. But it seems likely that the president’s being in that wheelchair gives him a very slow metabolism. Mike, it could be he drank more of that poison this morning than we figured on. This could be a delayed reaction.” I glanced at my watch. “It might just have taken ten hours for the poison to take its effect on him. What does McIntire say?”
“I don’t think that’s even occurred to him. McIntire thinks it’s indigestion. Or some kind of seizure. I mean the man is under so much pressure right now. After you-know-who skedaddled, I’ve never seen the boss so depressed. But then he picked himself right up again for this afternoon’s Big Three. Like nothing happened, you know?” He shook his head. “You should tell someone what you just told me. One of the doctors.”
“Not me, Mike. When I cry wolf, people have a nasty habit of saying, ‘What big teeth you have.’ Besides, that kind of information would only be useful if we knew what kind of poison was involved here.” I shrugged. “There’s only one man who can tell us and he’s unconscious.” I jerked my head behind me at Pawlikowski, lying on his hospital bed.
“Well, he’s awake now,” said Reilly. The agent glanced back at Roosevelt as one of the U.S. Army doctors finished fitting an intravenous line into the president’s arm to help rehydrate him. “Come on,” he said, and headed toward Pawlikowski’s bed. “There’s nothing we can do here. Let’s see what we can find out.”
Pawlikowski was staring up at the fan on the ceiling so that for a moment I almost thought he might be dead. But then his eyes flickered as he let out a long sigh and they closed again. Reilly leaned over his pillow. “John? It’s me, Mike. Can you hear me, John?”
Pawlikowski opened his eyes and smiled sleepily. “Mike?”
“How are you doing, pal?”
“Not so good. Some dumb bastard shot me.”
“I’m sorry about that.”
“That’s okay. I guess you were aiming for my leg, huh? You always were a lousy shot.”
“Why’d you do it, John?”
“It seemed like a pretty good idea at the time, I guess.”
“Want to tell us all about it?” Reilly paused. “I brought Professor Mayer along.”
“Good. I wanted to tell him something.”
“John, before you do—”
“What about Hitler?” asked Pawlikowski. “What happened to him?”
“He went home, John.”
Pawlikowski closed his eyes for a moment. “Mike? Give me a cigarette, will you?”
“Sure, John, anything you say.” Reilly lit a cigarette and then placed it carefully between Pawlikowski’s lips. “John. I need to know something right now. You poisoned Hitler’s water, right?”
Pawlikowski smiled. “You noticed that, huh?”
“What
kind of poison was it?”
“Strychnine. You should have let me kill him, Mike.”
But Reilly was already heading toward Admiral McIntire and Dr. Kaplan. Pawlikowski closed his eyes for a moment. I removed the cigarette from his mouth.
“Professor? Give me a drink of water, will you?”
I poured him a glass of water and helped him to drink it. When he had swallowed enough he shook his head and then looked at me strangely. But I was getting used to this. And Pawlikowski wasn’t in the same league as Stalin when it came to giving me a look.
“How does it feel?”
“How does what feel?” I asked. But I knew very well what he meant. Reilly came back and went around the other side of Pawlikowski’s bed. I put the cigarette back in his mouth.
“How does it feel to be the man who saved Hitler’s life?”
“I’ll be honest, I’ve done good deeds that I felt better about.”
“I’ll bet.”
“Is that all you wanted to say?”
“No.”
“What did you want to say to Professor Mayer?” asked Reilly.
“Only that he was right all along, Mike. And to apologize to him. For killing his girlfriend.”
“You killed that woman in Cairo? The princess?”
“Had to. She could have given me away. You understand, don’t you, Professor? I was there that afternoon when you came calling unexpectedly. I was up in the radio room when you arrived. Receiving a message from Berlin. When you showed up I had to wait until you and Elena were in bed before I could sneak out the back door. Which is why I forgot to burn the signal from Berlin. I remembered later. And came back in the small hours, to burn it. I figured you would be in bed with her again, and otherwise engaged. She was a great-looking broad. Nothing between us, though. Not that I would have minded, of course. But it was strictly professional. Anyway, I had just come in when I saw you up in the radio room. I stayed downstairs while you went back in her bedroom. And after you’d left the house, I went back in there and saw that you’d taken the signal.”
“But why didn’t you just kill me? Why kill her?”
Pawlikowski smiled thinly. The shadows under his eyes looked like the ash on the end of his cigarette and his lips were blue, as if the priest had been there slightly before me, with the communion wine.
“After all that heat you’d made about a German spy? No way. Killing one member of the president’s delegation was risky enough. But two? Besides, she would never have stood for it. She was fond of you, Professor. Very fond. So, I killed her, hid the radio, and made it look like you had done it. I’m sorry about that, Professor. Really I am. But I had no choice. Killing Hitler was more important than anything.”
“Yes, I see. But who put you up to this? Can you tell us who you were working for?”
“The Abwehr. Admiral Canaris. And some people in the Wehrmacht who don’t want the Allies to make a peace with Germany that leaves Hitler in power. They figured it might be easier killing him here than in Germany. That he wouldn’t be expecting it here. You see, back in Germany it gets more difficult each time they try.”
“But why you?”
“I’m a Polish-German Jew from Danzig, that’s why.” Pawlikowski took another drag off the cigarette. “That’s all the reason I needed.”
“Who recruited you, and where?”
Pawlikowski smiled. “I can’t tell you that.”
“But Thornton Cole was on to you, right? That’s why he was killed.”
“He wasn’t on to me. But he was on to my contact in Washington. That’s why he was killed. But I didn’t do it. Someone else did that.”
“But you did kill Ted Schmidt, aboard the USS Iowa, right?”
“He came to me with information that would have persuaded the police to take a closer look at Cole’s murder. It was a split-second thing. I guessed that if the Metro cops managed to find out who really did kill him, then they might find my contact. And that might put them on to me. That it might stop me from killing Hitler. So I hit him and threw the body overboard.”
“And on the Iowa, it was you who radioed your German friends back in the States, for the same reason.”
Pawlikowski nodded. “I love the boss,” he whispered. “I love him like he was my own dad. But he should never have tried to make peace with Hitler. You can’t make deals with someone like that. I’m sorry I killed those people. I didn’t like doing it. But I’d do it again, tomorrow, if it gave me another chance to kill Hitler.” He grabbed Reilly’s hand. “I’m sorry I let you down, Mike. And the boss, too. Tell him that for me, will you? But I did what I thought was right.”
“We all did, John. You, me, the professor here, and the president. We all did what we thought was right.”
“I guess so,” said Pawlikowski and fell asleep once again.
Reilly took his cigarette and stubbed it out. Straightening up, he glanced over his shoulder at the president, who was already looking a little more comfortable. We went to his bed. Dr. Kaplan said that poisoned or not, he was now quite stable and was going to be okay.
“It’s been a helluva long day,” groaned Reilly, pressing a fist into the small of his back. “So, Professor? What do you think?”
“I think that, all things considered, I wish I’d never left Princeton.”
XXVI
TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 30, 1943,
TEHERAN
WHAT WERE THE CONSOLATIONS of philosophy? None. And, for most of Monday and Tuesday, Stalin’s words echoed in my mind: “For myself, I think I should prefer to have seen Hitler dead on the floor of that conference room than to have him walk out of these peace talks. I cannot speak for Mr. Hull, but I know that Mr. Mikoyan would gladly have gone to the wall if it had meant us being rid of a monster like Hitler.”
I’d never had much time for the pessimism of Schopenhauer, but finding one of his books in the library at Camp Amirabad, I read him again; and what Schopenhauer had said, that no honest man at the end of his life would want to relive his own life, seemed to ring in my ears like a funeral bell.
By Tuesday, Roosevelt had made a complete recovery, and the gala dinner at the British legation to celebrate Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday now loomed. I debated not going but decided that consideration of Prime Minister Churchill’s feelings outweighed those of Marshal Stalin. What had still not dawned on me was how much of a leper I had become among my own people in Teheran. But immediately on my arrival at the British embassy, Harry Hopkins put me properly in the picture.
“Jesus, Mayer,” he hissed. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Churchill, overhearing this, advanced on him, growling like a bulldog defending a favorite ham bone.
“He’s here because I asked him, Harry. Professor Mayer is well aware that I should have regarded it as a personal insult if he had not come here tonight. Isn’t that so, Professor?”
“Yes, Prime Minister.”
“Excuse me, gentlemen.” The prime minister’s son Randolph, sober for once, took his father by the elbow. “May I speak to you for a minute, Papa?”
The prime minister turned away from my defense and stared at his son, kindly. “Yes, Randolph, what is it?”
Hopkins looked at me as if the stumps of my limbs were about to turn gangrenous. “All right,” he sighed. “But for Christ’s sake try to stay out of Stalin’s way. Things are difficult enough as it is.” Then he walked abruptly away and went over to speak to his own son, who was one of the guests.
Which was Churchill’s cue to come back and talk to me. Together we chatted and drank several glasses of champagne.
“My daughter did not think to tell me that there would be party games,” Churchill said, with patient good humor, as he watched Reilly and his Secret Service team search one half of the British legation, while the NKVD searched the other. “The trouble with a treasure hunt is that the searching is always more pleasurable than the finding. It is, I fear, self-evidently true of so much in life. And an axiom that
even now, in my seventieth year, gives me much pause for thought. Indeed, I often ask myself the question: Will the final victory feel as good as the last battle?”
A few minutes later, Roosevelt arrived, pushed up a ramp that led onto the terrace by his son Elliott and wearing a shawl against the cooler air of the evening. Outside the front doors of the British embassy, and in the presence of an honor guard, Churchill greeted Roosevelt, who handed over his birthday present—a Persian bowl purchased from the hard-currency shop in the grounds of the Russian embassy.
“May we be together for many years,” Roosevelt told the beaming Churchill, and then allowed himself to be wheeled into the dining room. But seeing me, he looked the other way and began to speak to Averell Harriman.
“Speaking as one who has been shunned many times,” Churchill said, “I have always persuaded myself that it is better to be shunned than to be ignored.”
Taking me by the arm, he led me back out onto the front terrace, where the Sikh guard of honor now awaited only Stalin’s arrival. A large black limousine had appeared in the driveway of the legation and was now rolling up to the entrance, which was the cue for Churchill’s Sikhs to present arms.
Seeing Stalin, Molotov, and Voroshilov step out of their limousine, I turned to go back indoors, but found my elbow held tight by the prime minister. “No, no,” growled Churchill. “Stalin may have his way with Eastern Europe, but this is my fucking party.”
Stalin, wearing his mustard-colored military jacket and a matching cape with a scarlet lining, came to the top of the legation steps. Seeing me next to Churchill, he paused, whereupon a British servant slipped between two of Stalin’s bodyguards and tried to relieve the Soviet leader of his cape, prompting one of the guards to draw his pistol and jab it in the poor man’s stomach.
“Oh, Christ,” muttered Churchill, “that’s all we need.” And, in an effort to defuse the situation, he took a step forward and thrust his hand toward Stalin. “Good evening, Marshal Stalin,” said Churchill. “And welcome to my birthday party. I believe this man was merely trying to relieve you of your cape.”
