Too Bad to Die

by Francine Mathews

  “Or executed,” Hudson observed, “after digging their own graves.”

  Harry Hopkins cleared his throat. “That sounds like sympathy for the Enemy, Mr. Hudson.”

  “Does it? My apologies, sir. But I think it’s worth remembering that we’re dealing with the Soviets. Who’d butcher their own mothers if Stalin told them to do it.”

  “I think that’s a bit—” Harriman began.

  “Hear, hear,” Marshall intoned.

  Hudson waited for silence. “We should be careful before we believe what the Russians say. Who knows if these Nazi commandos even exist? They haven’t shown us a single German.” He glanced at Roosevelt. “It seems damned convenient, Mr. President, that there’s nobody left to interrogate. Molotov’s ginned up a bogeyman.”

  “Why?” Roosevelt wondered genially. He was at ease in his chair, a cup and saucer balanced on his carefully crossed legs. “You know him best, Ave. Any ideas?”

  “Molotov’s just the front man,” Harriman said. “We already know Uncle Joe refuses to step outside his embassy’s door. There’s a lot of bad blood between the Persians and the Russians, Mr. President, and it’s not only about this Occupation. This so-called Nazi plot helps Stalin save face.”

  “In other words, he wants us to move over to that compound,” Schwartz interjected. “Accept his hospitality. Or Churchill’s.”

  “And piss off the fella you don’t take to the dance,” Marshall interjected. “Don’t get caught between the Lion and the Bear, Franklin. Fool’s game. Stay here.”

  “With respect, Mr. President, I agree,” Hudson said quickly. “Move into Stalin’s embassy, and you put yourself entirely into Soviet hands.”

  “There’s no love lost between you and the Russians, is there, Mr. Hudson?” FDR was smiling his shark’s smile. His teeth were bared, but no emotion reached his eyes. His face was creased with exhaustion; he wasn’t sleeping well in the series of strange beds he’d inhabited lately. “Winston has been pressing me to accept his hospitality. But I hate to give Uncle Joe the idea that we’re ganging up on him.”

  “Gil Winant won’t like it if you offend Churchill,” Harry Hopkins said. He was frowning; he was as fond of the PM as Gil was.

  “Winston will understand,” Roosevelt retorted. “Like a loyal dog, he always trots back. What exactly is it that scares you about Stalin’s shop, Mr. Hudson?”

  “Thugs monitoring your every move,” Michael said frankly. “If Lavrentiy Beria is in the Soviet embassy, the most deadly intelligence network in the world is there, too. There’s a reason Stalin chose Tehran for this conference, Mr. President.”

  “Which is?”

  “Because Beria has got one of the best NKVD spy networks already in place. His son was part of it for the past two years.”

  Schwartz raised his hand.

  Roosevelt nodded at him.

  “If Soviet intelligence is as crackerjack as Hudson says,” the Secret Service chief suggested, “shouldn’t we believe what they’re telling us about the Nazis?”

  This unexpected reversal stopped the conversation dead.

  Marshall looked at Harriman. Who looked at Roosevelt.

  “Mr. Hudson?” Roosevelt queried.

  “They’re more interested in you, Mr. President, than anybody else in the world right now,” he said. “You’re meeting Marshal Stalin for the first time. You’re about to negotiate the invasion of Europe. The future of the Balkans. The fate of Poland. He wants to know what you think. In the privacy of your own bedroom. No sitting president in your shoes would place himself in the hands of such an enemy.”

  “He’s our ally, Mr. Hudson,” Roosevelt reminded him.

  This time, the silence was profound.

  It was a matter of faith in government circles that Stalin was a friend to the United States. Somebody the President could work with. A sagacious and capable guy. But Hudson had followed the Great Terror of 1938. Lavrentiy Beria had made sure that Stalin’s rivals were accused and tried and shot for their crimes. Thousands had disappeared overnight into the gulags. Stalin’s boys made the Gestapo look like Judy Garland’s Lollipop Kids. Hudson doubted Roosevelt had an inkling of this, and it was no time to explain it to him. Roosevelt was still studying Michael’s face. “Does your friend Fleming agree with you?”

  Hudson glanced up quickly. “I couldn’t say, sir. We never discussed Mr. Stalin.”

  “I read his most recent cable. It tracks with the Russian story. He thinks these Nazi commandos want to assassinate all of us.”

  The men around the table stirred restively.

  “I think it’s possible Commander Fleming wrote that in an impaired state, sir,” Hudson said. “He was recently hit in the head, not to mention stabbed in the back. He lost blood. He can’t have been thinking clearly. And his story is . . . well . . . a little fantastic. In my opinion.”

  “What story? What cable?” Harriman demanded.

  He pushed back his chair and threw his napkin on the table, a potentate denied his empire. “And who the hell is Commander Fleming?”

  CHAPTER 18

  They shook hands with Dutch at the edge of the airstrip, their duffel bags at their feet. Ian was down to one spare uniform. Two of his jackets were bloody; one had a gaping slit over the shoulder blade. But he wouldn’t be wearing military clothes for the next few days, anyway. The farther he got from Cairo, the more of a deserter he became.

  “You’re headed back to Egypt?” he asked the pilot.

  “Soon as I spend your money.” Dutch held up Ian’s pound notes and grinned. “Wine, women, and song. If Tehran’s too hot for you two, just ask for old Dutch at the Park Hotel. I’ll be holed up there for the next few days if you need a plane out.”

  “Kind offer,” Ian said. “But right now I could use cab fare. Lend me a fiver?”

  Dutch handed him the bank note. He gave another to Fatima. “For those Messers you downed,” he said. “I’ll miss your hand on the gun, girl, flying home.”

  Ian saluted the Pole and watched as he ambled off, studying the aircraft scattered around the British base with a jewel thief’s eye. One of these days, Ian suspected, a plane would go missing from some godforsaken strip in the Middle East, and the Sow would be left in its place.

  “Cab fare?” Fatima asked him mockingly. “You are a British officer, Bond. Tehran is your town. Surely you don’t intend to pay for anything?”

  “I’m not a Communist,” Ian observed, “so presumably I’ll have to. We British think it’s bad form to exploit the downtrodden, you know—although I’m sure Stalin was anxious to keep that fact from you. This fiver won’t run to the Park Hotel, but with luck and the exchange rate, it should get me through a few days. Where do you intend to go?”

  She shouldered her bag with her good right arm. “To my people.”

  “You have family in Iran?”

  “Now Nazir is gone, I have family nowhere.”

  Ian considered this baldly. Fatima was young and alone in Persia, in the middle of a world war. It wasn’t a pretty picture. Unless you’d seen her fire a gun.

  “So there’s a local NKVD network?”

  Her green eyes were amused. “We are allies, Commander. Not friends. There is a limit to what I tell you.”

  She didn’t have to confirm what he already knew. Nazir had got his information about the Fencer from his NKVD colleagues in Persia. The local Soviet network must have considerable resources in this part of the world; Stalin himself was from the Caucasus region of Georgia, just north of Iran’s border. Soviet operatives had been active in this land for centuries. NKVD Tehran would have sources. Knowledge of the city. Arms.

  All things Ian might badly need in the next few days.

  “What if I could use an ally more than a friend?” he asked Fatima.

  “Call the American Embassy.”

  “There i
sn’t really one in Tehran. Besides, I’m not sure I can trust them.”

  “This is nonsense,” she said impatiently, and began to walk away from him. “I don’t have time to waste, Bond, and we expose ourselves like idiots. Anyone may see us. Good luck.”

  “Fatima—”

  She stopped in her tracks, her back still turned to him.

  “Someone in the Allied delegation in Cairo tried to kill me. Just like your grandfather.”

  “Then why are you still alive?”

  Good girl. She’d seen the contradiction as soon as he had.

  “That’s one of the questions I’d like to answer.”

  “I repeat: Good luck.” She stepped forward.

  “Fatima.”

  She sighed in exasperation, dropped her bag, and wheeled on him. “What?”

  “I knew too much. I might have told Churchill. Roosevelt. Ruined his plans. The Fencer thinks he stopped me—because I didn’t show up yesterday on a British plane.”

  “So?”

  “So he’s jolly well pleased with himself. Thinks I’m tucked up in bed at Mena House, eating ices, while the fate of this sodding war hangs in the balance. He’s free to kill the Allies in one fell swoop—”

  “I do not understand this. One fell swoop.”

  “In a single deadly blow. The point is, if I mean to catch him, I must stay hidden. He can’t know I’m here. I can’t saunter into the British Embassy and order drinks all round, or I’ll get coshed again. This time, he’ll make sure I’m dead.”

  She stared at him intently. “You will not catch him. Because I will do it first.”

  “I hope like hell you do,” Ian said. “But I know some things you don’t, Fatima. I know the delegations. American. British. The Fencer’s one of us. You haven’t even caught a glimpse.”

  He watched her consider this. Himself, as an asset she could use.

  “Your people know the ground,” he persisted, “and the Russian end of things. The NKVD must want me involved, old girl, because they told Nazir to contact me.”

  She looked away from him; they both remembered the episode of the saffron scarf. Her fingers grazing his, around a flaring cigarette.

  “Wouldn’t it be clever,” Ian said, “to pool our resources and make fools of them all?”

  —

  THE MAN IN THE WHEELCHAIR rolled carefully down the ramp from the American legation to the waiting car. It was pulled up at the rear of the building—safely hidden from a reporter’s camera or an unfriendly pair of eyes. Sam Schwartz was standing by the open rear door. Elliott stood beside him. Roosevelt grinned at both; his cigarette holder was clamped at a rakish angle between his clenched teeth, and his fedora was set precisely on his gray hair. When his chair reached the two men, Elliott moved behind it and braced the wheels. Schwartz extended his strong right arm. With an effort, Roosevelt forced himself upright. His useless legs offered no sensation and they were as wayward as two rolls of rubber. With practiced care, Sam helped his chief duck into the rear seat.

  The military driver saluted the President and slid behind the wheel. Elliott took the front passenger seat; Schwartz and his gun sat next to the President. The small walled compound that housed the American legation had a rear service gate; this had already been opened by Schwartz’s people, two of whom were standing at attention as the simple black car rolled by. Roosevelt lifted his hand in acknowledgment.

  “Sir,” Schwartz said, “now would be the time to remove your personal effects. If you don’t mind.”

  “Mind? This is the most fun I’ve had since Groton.” He was positively gleeful. In the front seat, Elliott broke into a smile.

  Roosevelt removed his hat, his spectacles, and the cigarette holder. Schwartz handed him a wool scarf to wrap about his collar, muffling the lower half of his face, and a soft newsboy’s cap to pull jauntily over his head. He also offered him a fake dark mustache, already slathered with spirit gum. FDR pressed it gingerly to his upper lip.

  “How’s that look?”

  “Preposterous,” Schwartz said, “but anonymous.”

  In fact, his chief looked completely unlike the occupant of the President’s official car, who at the same moment was waving grandly from the rear of the presidential limousine with fluttering American flags on the hood. That car moved at a stately speed, along with an entourage of Secret Service visibly brandishing weapons, several jeeps full of American servicemen, and three additional vehicles transporting Harriman, the Russian translator Chip Bohlen, Michael Hudson, Harry Hopkins, and George Marshall. They were all probably exiting the compound’s front gate at that very moment.

  One hundred American troops remained behind, their tents pitched in the legation’s courtyard, to guard a bird that nobody in Tehran knew had already flown. It was essential, Schwartz thought, to let the world believe Roosevelt was still staying there—as essential as moving him, now, to the Soviet Embassy.

  Elliott turned in the front seat. “Ready to brave the Nazis, sir?”

  In reply, Roosevelt slid a nine-millimeter revolver from his coat pocket. “More than ready, son.”

  —

  “OUTRAGEOUS,” Churchill growled.

  He had taken lunch on a tray in his bed, nursing his bronchitis with champagne. It appeared to be growing worse, which vexed him immeasurably—to be coughing and inchoate when he had meant to be eloquent was a cruel twist of fate. Now Pug Ismay was down with the vile disease as well; the British delegation was dropping in the traces when it most needed strength.

  Churchill liked working in bed. The embassy in Tehran was so deliciously Old England that he might have been at his beloved Chartwell rather than in Iran. But he had set aside his dispatch box at Pamela’s entrance. She had come to inquire if he would like a hand of bezique—charming in her cream-colored serge dress with a flared skirt and a collar high as a nun’s. She had stopped short, however, at the sound of engines in the central courtyard below. A convoy of cars, motorcycles, and jeeps filled with Secret Service men brandishing Thompson submachine guns had just roared through the compound’s gatehouse.

  “It’s the Americans.” She peered through the draperies of his window. He watched her head swivel from one side to the other, following the motorcade. She stood on tiptoe. “They’re pulling up in front of the Soviet Embassy. I gather they turned down our invitation.” There was an unexpected note of relief in her voice that, in other circumstances, Churchill might have noticed.

  “Apparently our accommodation was inadequate for them. Inadequate!”

  “Well, there are rather a lot of us already. I say, Papa”—she liked to call him that; it was a mannerism she’d adopted once she started living with the Churchills during her pregnancy three years ago—“somebody’s pretending to be Roosevelt. He’s just got out of the President’s car, and they’re all laughing at him. The Secret Service chaps, I mean.”

  Churchill swung himself out of bed, a comic figure in his old-fashioned nightdress, and joined her at the window. The Russian Embassy—he still thought of it as Russian, although it had been Soviet for over twenty-five years—was a beautiful Czarist building, a perfection of triangular pediment, broad steps and Doric columns that reminded one inevitably of the Parthenon. A regiment of French windows with Palladian fanlights gave on to the wide marble front terrace. A circular sweep of drive led up to it, through the pines that dotted the green compound Stalin shared with his British neighbors. By day, it was filled with birdsong, and the snowcapped heights of the distant Lesser Caucasus filled the horizon.

  There were at least thirty men milling around the sweep at the foot of the embassy’s steps with guns dangling from their hands. Standing near Franklin’s car, in a hat and spectacles remarkably like the President’s, was a fellow Churchill recognized. He could not quite remember his name.

  “A decoy,” he said hoarsely. “Clever, that. If anyone had trie
d to kill Franklin, they’d have got this fellow. Courageous of him.”

  “So where’s Roosevelt?”

  “Being carried by his bodyguards into the rear of the Russian Embassy, I’ll wager.”

  Pamela slipped her arm around Churchill’s shoulders. “Try not to mind, darling. Americans don’t mean to be beastly and offensive. They simply can’t help it. They’re like rude children playing at soldiers—they’ve no notion how deadly serious it all is.”

  Churchill squeezed her hand. “They won’t have to live with Stalin when this is all over. We will.”

  Pamela was a rare comfort—she understood so much without having to be told. It was the reason so many men adored her, he thought. She never criticized, never argued; she accepted and supported the people she loved. She was as bracing as a stalwart nanny, but far nicer to look at.

  She reminded him, more than he dared say, of his mother, Jennie. A brilliant political hostess, and a target of scandal in her day. Another unofficial power in the politics of her time. Pamela would go far, with or without Randolph.

  “Do you believe this story of German agents?” she asked.

  He frowned. “What story?”

  She shrugged. “Molotov sent for Ave after dinner last night. Now the Americans are moving into the Soviet Embassy. There’s a rumor going round that Roosevelt’s got the wind up. Some Nazi plot or other. I thought you might tell me if it’s true.”

  Harriman, Churchill thought in exasperation. He wasn’t bound by the limits the British government imposed on its public servants. The bloody Yanks had no real intelligence service. They understood so little of the secret world: How a brilliant deception could camouflage truth. Or a brotherhood bound by silence could safeguard an empire. They shared everything, as though it were enough to take a drink with a man to trust him. And they talked too much—especially to women. As though the ladies couldn’t make four from a pair of twos.

  “I wonder you didn’t tell me of Molotov’s summons before you turned in,” Churchill growled. “I should like to have known of it.”