The Wilson Deception

by David O. Stewart

  “Excuse me. I’m looking for information about my son, Sergeant Joshua Cook.”

  A flicker of recognition passed over the clerk’s face.

  “Do you know my son?”

  “No. No, I don’t.”

  “Can you tell me anything about him?”

  “That’s really a matter for Colonel Hayward. He’s due back in an hour. You can wait over there.” The clerk nodded toward some flimsy-looking chairs along the tent wall.

  “Can I look around for my son?”

  “He’s not here.”

  “Where is he? Where’s my boy, Sergeant Cook? Is he hurt?”

  “You have to wait for Colonel Hayward.”

  “Listen. I’ve been waiting for almost four months. I know Colonel Hayward.” Cook leaned forward across the makeshift table. He itched to grab the clerk and shake him.

  A hand clapped down on his shoulder, hard. Cook spun around, shrugging off the hand of a guard.

  When he turned back, the clerk had stepped back and was holding his hands out, palms down. “You have to wait. It won’t be long.”

  The minutes crept by. Then they moved slower. Then they got down on their bellies and lay completely still. Cook kneaded his wool cap, twisting it and untwisting it, punishing the soggy, scratchy fabric. He thought he would explode. Or scream. Or hit something.

  A man who had to be Hayward pounded through the tent flap. He pulled off his hat and shook the moisture off it while walking past the clerk and behind a canvas divider that hung across two-thirds of the tent. The clerk followed him without looking at Cook, who was already out of his seat. The clerk returned and waved him forward.

  Hayward came around his makeshift desk when Cook entered his space. They shook hands.

  “Colonel, we met in New York.”

  “Yes, I recall.”

  “I need to know what’s happened to my son Joshua.”

  “Your son’s alive, but he’s got troubles. Please sit down.”

  Speed felt shaky as he dropped into a chair. Hayward took a chair next to him. His strong, blunt features included a deep cleft in his chin. He looked Cook in the eye and described the situation.

  Cook’s relief turned to disbelief, then anger when he heard that General Parkman had reversed Joshua’s acquittal. “Colonel, what can I do? How can I get him free?”

  “Mr. Cook, that retrial might be happening right now or very soon. If I were a cynical man, I’d say they delayed it until the Three sixty-ninth was sent here to be shipped back to the States. That way, none of us can testify. Several of our officers testified for him at his first trial, about him being a good soldier.” Hayward held out a pack of cigarettes from his breast pocket.

  Cook declined the offer. Hayward lit one. He took a deep drag.

  “Where is he?” Cook asked.

  “Still near Chaumont, the army headquarters.”

  “Then I’ll go there.” Cook’s leg was jiggling up and down. He wanted to get on his way, but Hayward had been decent for a white man. Cook didn’t want to be rude.

  Hayward chewed his lip for a moment. “You might not want to go there first. You might think about starting in Paris. If you know any officers in the army, anyone at the peace conference, even someone in the French Army, maybe you can persuade them to help. General Parkman has been implacable, but your son’s case can’t be that important to him. Somebody above him might be able to fix this.” He sighed and put his hand on Cook’s arm. “I’m sorry for this. Your son’s a good man. Most of them are. Don’t believe anyone who says anything else. It’s been my privilege to go to war with them.”

  When Cook stepped out of the tent, he barely noticed the rain. He made it back to the railway station without noticing anyone or anything. He had no plan. He needed a plan. He thought of Aurelia and Cecily. He couldn’t write them with this news. It was too terrible. He’d write when he knew more. When he had a plan.

  Chapter 6

  Monday morning, January 27, 1919

  “I tell you, Jamie, I can’t stand this.” Colonel Jerome Siegel burst into Fraser’s office through the open door. He threw a stapled, multi-page memorandum on Fraser’s desk. The distinctive HQ format was unmistakable.

  “First we’re supposed to prepare for an advance into Germany. Then, it’s all about supporting the Army of Occupation in the Rhineland. Now it’s demobilize, demobilize, demobilize, fast as you can.” He stalked over to the lone window in the office and jammed his hands in his pockets. “And tomorrow, goddammit, it’ll be something else entirely.”

  Fraser got along fairly well with his commanding officer, a quiet, curly-haired doctor from Massachusetts. Siegel had risen far enough in the military bureaucracy that he hadn’t treated a patient in five years. Though he was an army lifer, he didn’t resent physicians like Fraser who parachuted into the army from lucrative private practices. He was glad to have good doctors, even wealthy ones with silk hat backgrounds, as long as they did the job for the men.

  “So, what’s the drill now?”

  “Send everyone home in ninety days. Ninety days! Wilson and his buddies downtown haven’t even begun to work out a peace treaty and we’re supposed to make plans to send all of these patients, all of our personnel, and all of our equipment home by May first.” He shook his head and threw himself into a visitor’s chair. “Imagine how screwed up the Germans had to be to lose to us.”

  “They’d been fighting for three years before we got here. We might give the French and the British and the Russians some of the credit.”

  “Thank God for all of them.” Siegel began to stroke his chin. “So, Jamie, I need you to work your magic again. A full plan for demobilization—every patient, every staff member, on a ship headed home by May Day.”

  “Pretty crazy.”

  “Especially since there’s no report of any real progress from the peace conference. I know you’ve been gaga over our commander in chief since he came through here, but he’d better saddle up and finish this business.”

  “Did you see his speech yesterday?”

  Siegel sat back with a smile on his face. “Nope, but I get the feeling I’m about to hear part of it.”

  Fraser reached behind him and grabbed the morning’s paper, which he had folded to Wilson’s speech. He used his finger to scan the text. “Here. Here he says it. ‘We are the masters of no people but are here to see that every people in the world shall choose its own masters and govern its own destinies, not as we wish but as it wishes.’” Fraser put down the paper and looked at Siegel. “Can you imagine an Englishman or a Frenchman or a German saying that?”

  Siegel smiled. “You forget, sir, that you’re talking to a New England Republican. We’re congenitally unable to applaud statements by Southern Democrats.” He shook his head. “I hope what he says is true, Jamie. For all our sakes, especially those poor bastards who did the dying.”

  Fraser leaned forward. “When do you need this new plan?”

  “Suppertime?”

  Fraser smiled and raised an eyebrow.

  “All right,” Siegel said, “just this once, you can have until Thursday morning.”

  “It doesn’t have to make sense, does it?”

  “How the hell could it?” Siegel stood and walked to the doorway, then turned back. “And Jamie, one more thing. I’d like you to be in the last contingent to leave, with me. Sorry, but I don’t want to try to run this operation without you.”

  “Of course, Jerry.”

  “Thanks.”

  Fraser stood and took the place before the window. The courtyard view was simple and stark. No snow. Bare trees that weren’t prospering. A few stone planters with scraggly plants. A gray sky above. He thought about preparing a plan to send everyone home in three months. Demobilization could never happen so fast.

  The prospect of home didn’t cheer him. These months in France, for all the gore and death and slaughter, had been a respite for him, a respite from the life that had been running off the tracks. He remembered a sa
ying from his childhood. If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans. Fraser had kept Him amused.

  He thought little of his first marriage to Ginny. Sometimes he couldn’t even summon up the image of her face. Their life together, one that seemed happy at the time, had disappeared into the roaring void of the night when she’d died giving birth to their baby boy, who also died, the pathetic Dr. James Fraser unable to save either.

  Eliza, he had thought, would bring him back to life. From the start, he had known she was a stretch for him. He was a country doctor, a widower, a hick from eastern Ohio. She was a glamorous figure, beautiful and poised, a former actress who deftly moved into theatrical management with all the skills of a professional performer. The first few years were wonderful. Their daughter Violet was a blessing. Fraser began to make his way in New York medical circles, learning to be a better doctor than he thought he could be. The chance to participate in research at the new Rockefeller Institute was more than he had ever hoped for.

  Yet he never lost his self-image as an overachieving bumpkin. He felt no surprise when Eliza tired of him and sought more diverting company. She tried to argue with him, to tell him what was wrong with their life, but he wasn’t any good at arguing. They were one-sided arguments. He couldn’t think of what to say until hours after she went to bed, long after it was too late. He began to work later and later at the lab, avoiding home. She was discreet about her gentleman friends, mostly. Fraser didn’t ask. The cuckolded husband is a ridiculous figure. It was better not to think about it.

  The experience of an unhappy marriage was such an appalling mixture of the infuriating and the trite. How could a person marry someone who made him unhappy? It seemed so simple. Marry a person who makes you happy. Marrying wrong was bad enough—after all, it made him unhappy most days—but piled on top were the embarrassment and the anger at himself for doing so. Yet all around him were people who made the same mistake. It was cold comfort. It only cheapened his own blunder, reducing his exquisite pains to the moral stature of a hangnail or a blister. They were all ridiculous, all of them.

  Then Howard, an actor, entered the picture and stayed far too long. He turned Fraser’s embarrassment into mortification. If Howard was what Eliza wanted—with his vanity, his good looks, and his empty head—Fraser had misjudged his wife from the start. When the war came, Fraser leapt at the chance to join the Army Medical Corps, an honorable way to stop having to share his home with a woman who seemed a stranger. The army was a refuge from his life.

  His father had served in the Thirtieth Ohio Volunteers during the Civil War, coming home from the Vicksburg campaign a sick and emaciated man who lingered at the edge of life for a few more years. By joining in this new war, Fraser could honor his father. He might even do his country some good.

  Soon, though, his time in refuge would end. He was going to have to face Eliza. Face his daughter. Face his life.

  He turned back to his desk and sat down. He could get a jump on the demobilization plan if he started before morning rounds.

  Chapter 7

  Thursday, February 6, 1919

  When Prince Feisal stood to approach the podium before the Peace Council, an electric charge flashed through the ceremonial conference room of the Quai d’Orsay. His black beard contrasted with his silvery turban. His flowing robe of soft gray silk was edged with scarlet. His dignity and calm suggested the quiet of empty spaces. He glided to the front of the room and began to speak in soft Arabic. Though none of the delegates understood the language, he commanded the room, casting a spell with unexpected glottal stops and gentle susurrations.

  Allen Dulles thought of the tales of Scheherazade.

  But the magic of the moment dissipated when the young prince had to pause for translation. An earnest interpreter rendered Feisal’s remarks into French, then a second interpreter restated them in clotted English. When Feisal began again, his Arabic had degraded from spellbinding to incomprehensible. Impatience and boredom built in the hot, high-ceilinged room.

  Allen Dulles, feeling trapped, sat in his usual place behind the principal delegates arrayed on one side of a vast table. Near each delegate was at least one interpreter, leaning forward vigilantly, ready to mutter clarifications into a master’s ear lest an offhand remark be lost in the soup of unfamiliar tongues. Behind Dulles’ row came the secretaries, striving to suppress the signs of their near-terminal boredom.

  Heavy curtains blanketed the tall windows, closing off twilight on the Seine. The conference’s familiar smells, tangy ink and heavy central heating, lingered in the air with a hint of violet hair wash from the French delegation. The principal delegates favored heavy black suits with brilliant white cuffs. Military advisers in blue and khaki and olive broke the visual monotony, as did the crimson drapes and green baize blotting pads before each delegate. An approaching messenger’s progress could be tracked through hushed footfalls on carpet and staccato bursts on parquet flooring. The cane seat of Dulles’ chair felt brittle. His mind strayed to the vixen he had met the previous night at El Sphinx, an establishment offering the sort of sensual Xanadu that could be found nowhere in North America. He wondered for a moment about tonight’s minx, Lady Florence. Inevitably, she would be more conventional. Unlike last night’s companion, though, she offered the enchantments of an estate in Surrey and properties on the Italian Riviera.

  Of the few spectators present for the prince’s appearance, one group stood out. Colonel Lawrence, green-tasseled headdress in place, burning blue eyes contrasting with a vague and insincere smile, watched his robed protégé from the second row of gilt chairs. Next to Lawrence were the heavy-featured American rabbi, Wise, and that hard-charging British Jew, Weizmann. Conference staff joked about Weizmann’s resemblance to Lenin, the Russian Bolshevik, but in truth the two men could have been twins.

  Clemenceau decreed a break between the prince’s talk and questioning by the delegates. To rally his spirits, Dulles moved directly to the tea table in the adjoining room.

  The large Colonel Boucher, never far from Clemenceau, approached with a plate stacked high with brioche and macaroons. “Monsieur Dulles. You must assist me with these.”

  “Solely in the interest of amity among allies.” He selected a brioche and bit through its crisp shell into its buttery center. He heard a low moan, realized that it came from him.

  “You have the brioche in America?”

  Dulles swallowed quickly. “Pale imitations, Colonel. Wicked ones, to be honest, which should be illegal.”

  “I am glad we can save you from such sins.” Boucher made short work of a macaroon and held a brioche at the ready while he swallowed.

  Dulles, toying with the idea of a second brioche, nodded toward the prince and his knot of colleagues. “Tell me, Colonel, what do you make of that rather motley collection?”

  Boucher looked troubled. “Motley?”

  “You have a Jewish chemist who invented explosives for the British, an American cleric of the Old Testament, and a glory-mad English soldier and archaeologist, all sponsoring a descendant of the prophet Mohammed.”

  “That is what motley means?”

  “Perhaps I should simply say unusual. But what do you make of them?”

  Boucher licked his fingers and again offered his plate of treats. Dulles decided on a macaroon. In Paris, he had concluded, the only crime was saying no.

  “I think,” the Frenchman said, “we should not think of them as unusual. They are something with which to be . . . coped, is that right? Your president, I am told, has many Jewish friends, as well.”

  “Not so many.”

  “Perhaps they seem like many to us.” Boucher shrugged and placed the plate on the table. “You know, we enter the war. We talk to our allies, the British, on what will happen in Syria and Jordan when we win. We agree with our allies and write down the agreement. Then, we win. Wonderful, we think. We shall have peace on the terms already agreed. They are, after all, written down. But this group, this unusual group”�
�Boucher loosed a theatrical sigh—“they do not like those terms because they have agreed to other terms with England. Colonel Lawrence prefers those other terms. The newspapers have great love for Colonel Lawrence, and Mr. Lloyd George reads the newspapers very carefully. The newspapers make Colonel Lawrence very strong. Suddenly our agreement—poof!” He lifted a cloth napkin from the serving table and used it to dab his lips and brush crumbs from the front of his tunic. “Perhaps your Mr. Wilson can use the shame to persuade Mr. Lloyd George to honor our treaty?”

  Dulles snorted. “Shame the British? You can’t be serious.”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “Really, Colonel. Can the French be shamed?”

  Boucher smiled. “Quite impossible.”

  Allen Dulles, uncharacteristically early for his evening date, noticed the Arab party in the dining room of the Hotel Majestic. Despite the influx of foreigners for the war and the peace conference, head scarves and robes still were conspicuous in a Parisian restaurant. The prince seemed to be something of a cut-up, entertaining his laughing companions. Evidently in the Arab world, as in the West, jests by the powerful are unfailingly funny.

  Rabbi Wise waved Dulles to their table and had another chair brought over. Dulles, with Lawrence translating, told the prince how fine his presentation had been that afternoon and what a strong impact it had on the delegates. Feisal waved off the compliment, which had been entirely insincere.

  Lawrence related that the prince was explaining that his family had no interest in being called kings. Because Feisal was a descendant of the prophet Mohammed and because his ancestors had been Sharifs of Mecca for 900 years, kings were far beneath his family. The prince smiled happily as Lawrence spoke, his composure before the Peace Council having slid into genial affability. He promptly directed a new story at Dulles.

  Again, Lawrence translated. “In the desert,” Lawrence said for Feisal. He seemed to know where the story was going. “Out in the desert, it is the custom to tie camels head to tail in a long row. That way they stay together in case of high wind, when the sand blows and it is possible to become lost. The camels are very strong but not so smart. No camel is fit to lead the other camels. He might simply lead them all in the wrong direction. So, it is the custom to put a little donkey at the head of the row, and the little donkey will lead. He is not strong, but he will go straight.”