Too Bad to Die

by Francine Mathews

  “If we spread ourselves too thin, and start brushfires all over the map, the Nazis will beat us with one hand behind their backs. Remember: I’ve got a hell of a war going on, myself, all over the Pacific. I can’t throw men and arms across Europe, too. This effort has to be focused and forceful, Winston. It has to end Hitler.”

  Churchill was silent; he knew as well as Roosevelt that a massive assault across the Channel into France would require the concentration of forces and matériel. If the blow was struck, it must be struck hard. But—

  “Uncle Joe wants us to draw as much of the German Army as possible away from the Eastern Front,” Roosevelt went on. “He wants Overlord. Overlord as it was outlined at last month’s Moscow Conference. And he wants it launched as soon as possible.”

  “I fail to comprehend why all alternatives are unworthy of consideration.” Churchill knew he sounded peevish; was it his cold, or his unhappiness? “At the very least, such joint operations as I’ve suggested might pave the way for Overlord. Ensure our success when once we breach the Channel defenses in Normandy. And that need not be so soon as May. It might well be . . . next year, perhaps.”

  “It worries you, doesn’t it? Going back into France?”

  Churchill shot Roosevelt a look. The man had never seen an entire army pulled off a French beach by a flotilla of simple fishing boats. He’d never watched the flower of his generation—good men, blood brothers like Val Fleming—die useless deaths in French mud. Churchill would willingly stand alone before a German firing squad, rather than consign an army to trench warfare again.

  “You told me in October,” Roosevelt persisted, “that the Germans were building guided missile launch sites in Pas de Calais and the Cherbourg Peninsula.”

  “Yes. Rockets capable of striking London.”

  Roosevelt pulled his cigarette holder from between his teeth and exhaled a cloud of smoke. “Don’t you want to get your boys over there and beat the crap out of them?”

  Churchill turned away and stared bleakly through the window. “And who is to command this Overlord?” he inquired. “Your man, I suppose?”

  —

  “SHE WAS accusing me of something, Gil.”

  Sarah and Winant were standing together in the small library where he’d talked to Harriman the previous day. Winant was reading a different book this morning, but the view and the peace were the same.

  “One of our fellas searched her room.” He raised his hand placatingly as Sarah began to protest. “Don’t ask me why. I’m not in the OSS chain of command. But he must have followed a damn good hunch, because he found what he was looking for. Pammie had a German codebook in her drawers.”

  “That’s absurd,” Sarah retorted. “Pamela? A spy?”

  “She denies it, too,” Winant said drily. “She told Ave you must have put it there. To get her in hot water.”

  Sarah took a step backward. “Hot water? That’s treason, Gil. She could be . . . tried for that. She could be . . .”

  “Executed,” he agreed. “Make a hell of a splash, wouldn’t it?”

  “I’d never do such a thing.”

  “I know.”

  “But Ave believes it?”

  “If blaming you puts Pamela in the clear? Sure. He’ll give it a thought.”

  She sank down onto the sofa. Winant sat next to her. Sarah stared at her knees, brow furrowed. “She must truly think I hate her.”

  “Don’t you?”

  “Not in that way. Not to see her killed. But there’s something else, Gil. We assumed she’d tried to end it all yesterday, with that dose of chloral. It didn’t make sense at the time. It makes even less now.”

  “Ave thought she couldn’t face the music.”

  “Nonsense. Pamela’s as tough as nails. She as much as accused me just now of murder—all sorts of insinuations about putting things in her drink. Which means, Gil, that she didn’t do it. Someone else gave her more than she wanted.”

  “In her own tooth glass?”

  Winant sounded skeptical.

  “It’s not as though she’s alone in her bedroom very often,” Sarah snapped. “But that’s not what I meant to suggest. I think she took her usual bedtime dose from the bottle on her nightstand—but it was a second dose. Someone had given her a first. Without her being aware. Perhaps in a drink. Something that disguised the taste.”

  “Champagne,” Winant said. “She’s generally got a glass in her hand.”

  Sarah’s head lifted. “She went out that night. After I quarreled with her.”

  “Drinking?”

  “In the Park Hotel bar.”

  Winant moved swiftly, Sarah following, from the small study at the rear of the embassy to the wide foyer at the front entrance. A porter sat there, on guard, as he always did.

  “Excuse me,” Winant said in his usual self-effacing way, “were you on duty here two nights ago, by any chance?”

  The porter looked from Winant to Sarah, standing behind him. The Prime Minister’s daughter. A slightly scared expression crossed his face; he was, Sarah thought, probably little more than eighteen.

  “No sir, Mr. Ambassador, sir, I was not.”

  “It’s all right, Perkins,” Sarah said. “We wondered if anyone saw Mrs. Randolph Churchill when she returned that evening.”

  Perkins’s expression eased. He reached for a telephone in a cubby set into the wall by his station. “I’ll just ask in the mess, shall I?”

  They waited out the murmur of conversation.

  Perkins replaced the receiver. “It was Morrow, ma’am, who helped Mrs. Randolph out of her cab.”

  Winant’s eyes narrowed. “Did she need help?”

  “I couldn’t say, sir. Morrow will be out directly to speak with you.”

  Morrow was older and tougher-looking than Perkins, but he flushed scarlet when Sarah asked him about Pamela.

  “Sound asleep like a baby in the backseat of the car,” he said. “I had to shake her. Meaning no disrespect. I’d never have touched her, ma’am—knowing it to be a liberty—if she hadn’t been so hard to rouse. Paid off the cab and helped the lady up the stairs, I did—all the way to her room. Though I’m not supposed to desert my station. I didn’t think she’d make it there, otherwise.”

  “Thank you, Morrow. I’ll repay you for the cab fare.”

  “That isn’t necessary, ma’am.” He went, if anything, redder. “It’s an honor to do for one of the Churchills.”

  “All the same—” Sarah broke off, and turned to Gil. His hand was extended, carefully official for the watching porters. “I’ll say goodbye now, Mrs. Oliver. Thank you for your hospitality.”

  Her brows knit faintly. “You have an appointment, Mr. Winant?”

  “At the Park Hotel. And there’s no time to waste.”

  CHAPTER 33

  Ian was lying in the fetal position on the floor of the German safe house. He’d been bound and gagged and thrown into a windowless storeroom. Eight inches from his face were the staring eyes of the NKVD operative who’d trained a gun on him in the lorry so unwaveringly last night—the one who’d kept the oil lamp upright while he listened to Erich and Ian talk. There was a large and ragged hole in his chest where the paratroopers’ bullets had torn away the flesh around his heart. The storeroom was dark, but Ian could still make out the gleam of the man’s dead eyes and the stench of his blood.

  He had not slept. The noise from the far side of the wall—the main room where Zadiq was forced to watch his son be tortured during the long hours of the night—made the idea of sleep obscene.

  Ian tried to inch away from the corpse, but his limbs were too numb. He was as heavy and useless as a beef carcass suspended from a butcher’s hook.

  Zadiq was sobbing now. Exhausted words spewed out in English and Armenian. Did the bastards realize he didn’t speak German? That the brutalities they wer
e practicing on Arev could never force his father to confess in a language they would understand?

  And then he heard Erich’s voice. The German agent was foolish enough to try to intervene. Ian hadn’t heard him or his partner Tomàš in hours. Had they been sent out of the safe house?

  Had they met up with the Fencer?

  His blood quickened suddenly at the thought. Then his excitement died. If the paratroopers could contact their Nazi handler without the use of a radio, there was nothing for Alan Turing to intercept. Nothing for Gracie to report. Nothing that might spur a hunt for a missing Commander Fleming.

  Your prospects for survival were always dim, Mr. Bond.

  It was possible that Zadiq would have killed him in the end; but it was certain the Nazis would.

  He heard the tramp of booted feet cross the uncarpeted lino floor. The storeroom door was pulled open. The searing stream of daylight hurt his eyes. He squeezed them shut, gagged mouth in a rictus.

  He was hauled to his feet, which failed to support him. He fell to his knees and toppled sideways onto the Armenian’s corpse. Two men lifted him now and dragged him passively from the storeroom and into the normalcy of a November morning. He cracked his eyelids, willing himself to endure the light and take in the scene. Three of the paratroopers were seated at the kitchen table. One of them had made coffee, but there did not seem to be much food shared between them. Their helmets were off and their rifles were stacked on the floor nearby.

  Arev was suspended by his wrists from a ceiling rafter. His hands were bent at a bizarre angle, as though the wrists were broken. He was naked, and strips of his skin had been flayed from his buttocks, his ribs, his groin, and his face. Ian slipped on a wad of flesh discarded on the floor and saw too late that he had trod on Arev’s scrotum. The boy had been castrated during the night. Gouts of blood trailed down his legs.

  Ian glanced at Arev’s face. The painful thinness of the skull seemed unspeakably poignant now—because it screamed of his youth. All the years he had yet to grow. Ian saw that he was either dead or unconscious. The paratroopers seemed indifferent to the boy now, so perhaps Zadiq had given them something they valued.

  Ian looked around for the NKVD leader.

  Zadiq, too, was naked.

  He was seated awkwardly in a kitchen chair whose seat had been hacked out, so that his genitals dangled through the hole. His legs were tied to the chair legs, and his arms were stretched behind him and tied to the chair back. Ian could see the strain in his shoulders and the hideous vulnerability of everything else. The hair on the man’s chest was grayish white, sparse, pathetically aged. Zadiq’s head was hanging and he did not lift it as Ian was dragged across the room.

  One of the paratroopers—Ian thought it was the first he’d glimpsed last night, an apparition with a gun in the darkened doorway—held a length of chicken wire in his right hand, the kind used for temporary fences in the field. It was tacked to a piece of wood maybe eighteen inches long, a sort of makeshift paddle. As Ian watched, the paratrooper swung it sharply under Zadiq’s chair. The chicken wire tore at the man’s dangling genitals. Zadiq screamed.

  There was a second chair near the NKVD commander. The bottom had been hacked out of it, too. Ian guessed sickly who it was for.

  He’d regained enough use in his legs and arms to struggle, at least, when they began to tear off his clothes.

  —

  “AMBASSADOR WINANT! It is an honor, sir, to welcome you here.”

  Abolhassan Diba rose from his chair behind the handsome pearwood desk and offered his hand. He spoke French—almost his first language, Winant guessed. He knew very little about the Iranian business magnate, other than that he had been educated, like so many aristocratic Persians, in Switzerland and France.

  French was the universal diplomatic language. Out of courtesy, Winant fell into it immediately.

  “The honor is all mine, sir. To receive me without proper notice—no appointment—”

  “It is nothing,” Diba said. “Please—if you would consent to take a seat.”

  Winant had tracked his elusive quarry from the Park Hotel—which Diba owned, but only frequented at meals or during the evening nightclub hours—to this office building a few blocks to the north and west. At six stories, it was one of the highest buildings in Tehran, and Winant was surprised to see an elevator waiting in the lobby. They were rare in Persia. The lift operator informed him that Diba had been the first entrepreneur to bring them from Europe to his country.

  “I hope you are finding the Park Hotel comfortable, Ambassador?” the man inquired politely.

  “Perfectly. It’s a lovely place.”

  “You have everything you require?”

  “And more.” Winant clasped his hands over his knee, a characteristic gesture. “I regret that I have been able to spend so little time in your beautiful establishment. But the duties of the conference . . .”

  “I understand. Perhaps when this dreadful war is over, you will pay a visit to Iran solely for pleasure.”

  “I hope I may. But it is about the conference that I have come to speak to you this morning,” Winant said. “I am presently serving as ambassador to Great Britain. I divide my time in Tehran between President Roosevelt and the British Embassy, consulting with Prime Minister Churchill. Are you aware, Mr. Diba, that the Prime Minister brought several members of his family with him?”

  An expression of hauteur descended on the handsome face; the black brows lifted imperiously. The French became, if possible, more formal and florid. “I am. I had the very great pleasure of making the acquaintance of Mrs. Randolph Churchill a few evenings ago. I shall not soon forget so divine an experience.”

  My God, Winant thought. He thinks I’m an asshole. That I’m here to tell him no Persian should presume to talk up a lady like Pamela.

  There’s diplomacy, for you.

  “I’m relieved to hear it,” he said, with conscious warmth. “You may be of immeasurable service to the government of Great Britain, Mr. Diba—and to the Churchill family.”

  “If I may assist you in any way—”

  Winant summoned his most respectful French. “You are undoubtedly unaware that Mrs. Randolph Churchill has been decidedly unwell in recent days. In fact, those closest to her fear that she has been deliberately poisoned.”

  “Ambassador Winant, I hope you are not suggesting—”

  “Not by anyone at your magnificent hotel, of course,” Winant added, with a placating gesture. “But perhaps by . . . someone she encountered there.”

  “I am desolated to hear of it,” Diba returned. He rose from his chair and came around the pearwood desk. His hands were folded behind his back, and he began to pace before the electric fire—another innovation he’d probably introduced to his country. “Is Mrs. Churchill in any danger?”

  “She was discharged from a private nursing home this morning, and we have every reason to believe she is on the mend.”

  “May I inquire what poisoned her?”

  “Chloral,” Winant said. “Probably administered without her knowledge, in a drink.”

  “She took only champagne in my presence,” Diba said. “Pol Roger 1928. A favorite vintage of Prime Minister Churchill’s, I understand. I had it brought from the cellar by one of my personal assistants. And uncorked, I might add, by that same man at the craps table. He poured it out for us under my eye. I certainly suffered no ill effects from drinking it.”

  “So, unless the poison was put into the bottle in France itself . . .”

  “Mrs. Churchill cannot have been sickened in my company.”

  “The idea is so ridiculous, Mr. Diba, that I did not for one second consider it,” Winant said. “But I still hope you may help me. When you parted from Mrs. Churchill, did she go directly into a taxi?”

  “I cannot say. She encountered an acquaintance, you see, who claimed a dan
ce, and swept her away from the craps table.”

  “Ah,” Winant said.

  Diba looked at him piercingly. “I imagine you are familiar with the gentleman, as he is a member of your delegation.”

  “Is he, indeed?”

  “Yes. I cannot quite recall the name. You understand, it was mentioned only a few times in my presence. An introduction . . . from Mrs. Churchill to myself . . .”

  Winant waited, a benign smile of inquiry on his face.

  “A river,” Diba said suddenly. He snapped his fingers in a thoroughly Gallic gesture. “Yes, that is it. The man had the name of a famous river. Not Thames, but . . .”

  “Hudson,” Winant said.

  Disappointing. He already knew Michael Hudson had talked to Pamela that night. It was Hudson who had confronted her with the German codebook.

  “And you know of no one else? You did not observe Mrs. Churchill at any other point in the evening?”

  Diba shook his head regretfully. “I did not. The press of business . . .”

  “Of course.” Winant rose and offered his hand to the Iranian. “Thank you for your time.”

  “It is nothing, Ambassador. Tell me—” Diba hesitated. “If I were to dispatch a bouquet of flowers to Mrs. Churchill—it would not be regarded as an impertinence?”

  “It would be regarded, Mr. Diba, as the very highest mark of esteem,” Winant returned.

  —

  THE CROWD assembled in the zurkhaneh was entirely male. Although the covered wrestling arena was only a few blocks from the Park Hotel, it was centuries distant in both style and substance. Koshti, or wrestling, was the most cherished sport in the Caucasus—and every Iranian province had its own type, rooted in folklore and tribal custom. The Mazandarans preferred loucho; the Golestans, tourkamani style. In this place, however, it was Pahlavani wrestling that ruled. It was no accident that Pahlavani wrestling was named for the Shah’s tribe, or that it was considered the “official” wrestling school. For years, it had been a religious practice as well as a contest. Religion and dictatorship, Siranoush reflected, went hand in hand in Persia.