Hitler's peace

XIII

I had missed the boat. Leaning on the hood of my car, I smoked a cigarette and looked out at the waters off the southernmost point of Maryland’s Western Shore where the USS Iowa was now no more than a trail of smoke on the burnished horizon. It was hardly my fault; the Iowa had sailed early. Or so the pierman had told me.

I was still pondering my next move when a couple of black Hudsons rolled up and discharged four tough-looking men with nervous eyes and tight lips. They were wearing dark suits, hats, and ties that matched their less than sunny dispositions.

I threw aside my cigarette and straightened up. So this was how the FBI arrested you. They got you to drive seventy miles out of Washington on a wild-goose chase and then, when you were waiting somewhere quiet, they picked you up without any fuss. True, I had a gun in my shoulder holster, but there was less chance of my using it to resist arrest than there was of my not being able to complete the crossword puzzle in the Post.

“Professor Mayer,” one of the men asked, with a voice that contained no inflection. He had a hard, neat, well-kept face, like the picket fence in front of the American Horticultural Society. He tried to put a smile in his blue eyes but it came off looking sarcastic.

“Yes,” I said, bracing myself. I almost held my wrists out in front of me.

“Could I see some identification, please, sir?” While he waited, he pulled his finger until the knuckle cracked.

I took out my wallet. I was sure they were about to inspect Donovan’s suitcase and inform me I had failed to notice something concealed in the wrapping of the parcel that would prove I had opened it.

The man looked at my ID card and then handed it to one of his colleagues; finally he produced his own ID. To my surprise, he was a U.S. Treasury Agent-not from the FBI at all.

“I’m Agent Rowley,” he said. “From the Presidential Secret Service detail. We’ve come to escort you on board ship.”

Relieved that I was not going to be arrested, I laughed and waved my hand at the empty dock. “That I’d like to see, Agent Rowley. The boat is gone.”

Agent Rowley managed a sort of smile. His four teeth were small and sharp and far apart. I could see why he hadn’t put his mouth into the smile before. “I’m sorry about that, Professor. The Iowa had to offload oil to allow her draft to make it up the Chesapeake. So now she’s gone on to Hampton Roads to take on more fuel. I’m afraid you’d left home before we had a chance to inform you this morning.”

It was true. I’d left just before eight o’clock that morning. After my romantic evening in Chevy Chase, I’d made an early start. Which was easy enough, given that I hadn’t actually gone to bed.

“But that’s on the other side of the bay. Is there another boat to take us there?”

“I’m afraid not, sir. We’re going to have to drive. One of these agents will take your car back to Washington. If you don’t mind, sir, we’ll hold on to your identity card for now. It’ll make things easier for us supernumeraries when we go on board the Iowa. ”

“You’re going, too?”

“Four of us. Ahead of the president, who’s going aboard after midnight. The boss is an old Navy man and he’s kind of superstitious. Friday-night sailings are bad luck.”

“I’m not so crazy about them myself.”

Three hours later we passed through a naval security checkpoint and were directed to the quay where the Iowa was to be found. All of us fell silent as, turning onto the quay, we caught our first sight of the Iowa ’s distinctive clipper bow and, behind it, the forecastle and fire-control tower that rose a hundred feet above a deck bristling with gun batteries. But the height of the Iowa ’s superstructure looked compact compared to its enormous nine-hundred-foot length, which, together with the 212,000-horsepower engines, gave the battleship its high speed.

Alongside the battleship, last-minute stores and other supernumerary passengers were going aboard under the watchful eyes of a group of armed sailors. A couple of tugs spewing smoke were attaching lines alongside the crocodile’s nose that was the bow. Above all these, on three different decks, sailors leaned on rails observing the comings and goings below. As I walked up the port gangway underneath the massive antiaircraft battery, I felt as if I had arrived in an oceangoing shanty town built of armored steel. A strong smell of oil filled my nostrils, and somewhere above the primary conning position flue gases were venting noisily into the gray November sky. The ship felt alive.

At the end of the gangway, one of the Secret Service agents was already handing over my bags and my ID to a waiting officer. Consulting a clipboard, he ticked a sheet of paper and then waved another sailor toward me.

“Welcome aboard, sir,” the sailor said, collecting my bags. He had the kind of Brooklyn mutt’s face you got in a choir, but only if the choir was in Sing Sing. “If you’ll follow me I’ll show you to your quarters. Please watch your step-the deck is a little wet-and your head.”

The sailor led me along a passageway. “We got you in a wardroom one level below the flag and signal bridge. Just so you can remember where that is, that’s underneath the main battery detector and behind the second uptake.”

“Uptake?”

“Funnel. If you get lost, just ask for the second uptake 4A. Four A is the forty-millimeter magazine.”

“That’s a comforting thought.” I ducked to follow him through a doorway.

“Don’t you worry, sir. The face armor on this ship is seventeen inches thick, which means the Iowa is meant to go in harm’s way and take that shit.”

We ducked through another doorway, and somewhere behind us a heavy door clanged shut. I was counting myself lucky that I didn’t suffer from claustrophobia.

“Up here, sir,” the sailor said, heading up a flight of stairs. “In there you got the head. You’ll be messing forward of here, sir, with the other supernumeraries, in the captain’s pantry. That’s in front of the first uptake, underneath the secondary battery detector. Meals are 0800, 1200, and 2000. If you want to throw up, I advise you to do it in the head and not over the side. On this ship someone’s liable to get a face full if you go puking in the wrong place.”

Mutt-face put my bags down in front of a polished wooden door and knocked hard. “You’re sharing with another gentleman, sir.”

“Come,” said a voice.

The sailor opened the door and, saluting out of habit, left me to make my own introduction.

I put my head into the cabin and saw a face I recognized, a guy from the State Department named Ted Schmidt.

“Willard Mayer, isn’t it?” said Schmidt, rising from a narrow-looking bunk and advancing to shake my hand. “The philosopher.”

“And you’re on the Russian desk at State. Ted Schmidt.”

Schmidt was a pudgy man with dark curly hair, thick horn-rimmed glasses, and eyebrows to match. I had known him briefly at Harvard and recalled a slightly thinner man with a good sense of humor and a taste for expensive wine. He was smiling, only the smile didn’t sit right beside the sadness in his twitching, bloodshot eyes, the patches of stubble he’d missed with his Rolls, and the liquor on his breath. Two o’clock in the afternoon was a little early to be hitting the cabin bottle, even for a star-crossed lover like me. He was wearing a pair of corduroy trousers, a thick checked shirt, and a pair of English brogue shoes. In his hand was an unlit nickel cigar. Apart from what he was wearing, he looked and sounded like almost anybody you might see at State. He sounded like a character in a novel by Edith Wharton.

“Welcome to second class. I suspect there are better cabins than this one. And I know there are worse ones.” Schmidt picked up Donovan’s blue leather suitcase and brought it into the wardroom. “Nice luggage. Did you steal it?” Seeing me frown, he pointed to the initials WJD.

“It belongs to General Donovan. I’m taking it to Cairo for him.” I threw my own case onto the bed and closed the door.

“There’s another guy from State, fellow named Weitz, John Weitz, who’s somewhere ahead of the chimney stack. By the look of it, he’s sleeping in a closet. There’s just me and him, from State. We’re along to translate what the Rooskies are saying. Not that I think we’ll even get near the table. Harriman’s flying into Cairo from Moscow with his own guy. Fellow named Bohlen. So Weitz and I are on the bench, I think. Until Bohlen breaks his neck or fumbles the ball. The State Department’s in pretty bad odor right now.”

“So I hear.”

“And you? What’s your function on this little mystery tour?”

“Liaison officer from General Donovan to the president.”

“Sounds suitably vague. Not that anyone’s saying very much at all. Even the crew don’t know where we’re going. They know it’s somewhere important. And that some VIPs are coming aboard. Did that sailor give you the crap about the effectiveness of our armor?”

“As a matter of fact he did. I imagine the purser on the Titanic gave his passengers the same spiel.”

“You better believe it.” Schmidt laughed scornfully and lit the cigar. It stunk up the room as if he’d put a match to a skunk. “I haven’t met a sailor yet who understands the principle guiding the Iowa ’s immune zone. Put simply, our armor is compromised by the effective range of our guns. We have to get in closer to a target to use them, and the closer we get, the more likely it is that a shell will cause some real damage.

“Then there are the torpedoes. German torpedoes, that is, not ours. The kraut fish are more powerful than the Iowa ’s designers allowed for. Oh, I’m not saying we’re at risk or anything. But a direct hit is a direct hit, and no amount of armor is going to stop the effect of that. So the next time you hear some guy blowing off about the impregnability of this ship, ask him why the crews manning those gun turrets carry derringers in their boots.”

“Why do they carry derringers in their boots?” I asked. I didn’t imagine it was because they played a lot of poker.

“Take a look inside one of those turrets and you’ll understand. It takes quite a while to get out of one. They probably figure that it would be better to shoot themselves than be drowned like rats.”

“I can understand that.”

“Me, I have a real fear of drowning,” admitted Schmidt. “I can’t even swim, and I don’t mind admitting that this voyage fills me with a sense of foreboding. My brother was a sailor. He was drowned on the Yorktown, at the Battle of Midway.” Schmidt smiled nervously. “I guess that’s why the subject preoccupies me so much.”

“You won’t drown,” I said, and showed Schmidt one of the two automatics I was carrying. “If necessary, I’ll shoot you myself.”

“That’s very American of you.”

“Don’t mention it. It’s the least I can do for a Harvard man.”

Schmidt opened a small locker by his bed. “I’d say that calls for a drink, wouldn’t you?” He produced a bottle of Mount Vernon rye and poured two glasses. Handing one to me, he said, “Here’s to not drowning and not getting blown up by a torpedo.”

I raised my glass. “And to the Big Three.”

I really don’t remember much more about the rest of that day except that Schmidt and I got as stiff as a couple of cigar-store Indians. That made me feel a lot better about what I’d seen on Diana’s rug the night before, which is to say, I stopped feeling very much at all. Schmidt probably drank about twice as much as I did. For one thing it was his liquor we were drinking. For another, I figured he’d had a lot more practice. He put the stuff down his throat with no more thought than if it had come straight out of a cow.

There was no fanfare for the president’s arrival on board the Iowa. Waking early the next morning, we discovered that the ship was already under way, and since it seemed highly unlikely that the Iowa would have left Hampton Roads without him, we concluded that Roosevelt must have joined the ship sometime during the night.

Donning thick coats and ignoring our hangovers, we went up onto the first superstructure deck to catch sight of the Iowa and its escort of three destroyers at sea. It was a raw, cold morning and the wind off the rough-looking sea quickly sharpened our appetites. We went forward in search of breakfast. In the captain’s mess, we found several of the Joint Chiefs and Harry Hopkins already at the table under the restless eyes of four Secret Service agents at the next table.

A cadaverous man in his early fifties, and clearly sick from cancer-a disease that had also killed his wife and father-Hopkins glanced up from his neglected ham and eggs and nodded affably our way. “Good morning,” he said pleasantly as Generals Marshall and Arnold continued their impenetrable conversation.

“Good morning, sir.”

Seeing Hopkins in the flesh-what little there was of it-drove home the strangeness of a man not in uniform and with no official position in Roosevelt’s administration playing such an important role in our forthcoming mission. Beyond the fact that he was from Sioux City, Iowa, and had been secretary of commerce, I knew very little about the man who had been living in what had been Lincoln’s study at the White House for more than three years. I’d seen men with thinner arms and faces, but only on a pirate’s flag. The cuffs of his shirt had almost swallowed up his hands. His salt-and-pepper hair was as dry and lifeless as the front lawn of a bankrupt tenant farm in Oklahoma. Shadowy dark eyes full of pain gave the impression he had been stabbed just under the heart. A cynic might have suggested that Roosevelt kept Hopkins around to make himself appear electably healthy.

Given the president’s brief, that I should understudy this frail, scrappy-looking man, I was hoping to get a chance to know him better during our voyage; but Hopkins was way ahead of me.

“Which one of you two boys is Professor Mayer?” he asked. “The philosopher.”

“Me, sir.”

“I read your book,” he said, and smiled. His teeth looked so even, I wondered if they might be false. “I can’t say that I understood all of it. I was never much of a scholar. But I found it…” He paused. “Very energetic. And I can see why it would appeal to other philosophers to have a philosopher telling them all how important they are.”

“In that respect, at least,” I said, “philosophers are no different from politicians.”

“You’re probably right,” and he smiled again. “Sit down, Professor.” He shifted his smile to Schmidt. “You, too, son. Help yourself to some coffee.”

We sat. The coffee was surprisingly good and very welcome.

“Coming back to your book for a moment,” said Hopkins. “It seems to me that while your approach is generally right, your details are wrong. I’m not a philosopher, but I’m a pretty good gin rummy player and, well, the mistake you make is to assume that every card you hold that doesn’t look as though it might make a meld is deadwood. Your deadwood might make the other fellow a sequence, or a group, and therefore you might be ill advised to discard it. Do you see what I’m saying?”

“Maybe that’s true,” I said. Then, embracing Hopkins’s metaphor, I continued. “But there has to be some deadwood or you couldn’t discard. And if you can’t discard, you can’t complete your turn. I like your analogy, sir, but I think it helps my position more than yours.”

“Then I guess you should go ahead and knock,” grinned Hopkins. He finished his coffee. “I take it you play the game. Gin rummy?”

Ted Schmidt shook his head. “Just bridge,” he said.

“Oh, that’s too sophisticated for a country boy like me.”

“I play,” I said.

“Thought you did. Well, good. We’ll have a game later on.”

Hopkins stood, nodded courteously, and left the mess. A minute or two later, the two generals followed, accompanied by Agent Rowley, leaving Schmidt and me alone with the three remaining Secret Service men. A minute or two later, Schmidt excused himself. He looked as if he was going to throw up.

In their cheap dark suits, the three agents stuck out like a trio of gooseberries among all the uniforms and the Sloppy Joes like Schmidt and me. Underneath the White House veneer, they were just cops with better manners and sharper razors. In the cramped conditions of the ship, they seemed boxed in and unmanned. Thick-ribbed, urgent, puissant, they had the look of men who needed to ride on the running board of a presidential limousine and investigate suspicious open windows in order to give their lives meaning, in the same way that I required a good book and a Mozart quartet.

“What exactly does a philosopher do?” asked one of them. “If you don’t mind me asking.” The man tossed a packet of Kools onto the table and leaned back in his chair.

I picked up my coffee cup, went over to their table, and sat down. One of the other agents tamped his pipe with a biscuit-colored thumb and stared at me with dumb insolence.

“There are three kinds of questions in life,” I told the man. “There’s the how-does-fire-work kind of question.” I picked up one of his cigarettes, put a flame to it, snapped the lighter shut, and then shook the rest of his cigarettes onto the table. “Then there’s the how-many-cigarettes-do-you-have-left kind of question. Ten take away one equals nine, right? Most of the questions you can ask in life will fall into one of those two boxes. Empirical or formal.

“And the questions that don’t? They’re the philosophical ones. Like, ‘What is morality?’ Philosophy begins when you don’t know where to look for an answer. You say to yourself, What kind of question is this, and what kind of answer am I looking for? And is it possible that I might be able to slot this question into one of the other two boxes after all? That, my friend, is what a philosopher does.”

The three agents looked at one another with skeptical expressions and restrained smiles on their faces. But the Secret Service agent hadn’t finished quite yet with our oceangoing Socratic dialogue. “So what about morality?” he asked. “The morality of killing someone in wartime, for instance. Better still, the morality of killing Hitler. Morality tells you that murder is wrong, right? But suppose it was Hitler. And suppose you had the chance to kill Hitler and save thousands, perhaps millions of people.”

“You ask me, Stalin’s just as bad as Hitler,” said one of the other agents.

“Only, here’s the thing,” continued the man. “You’re not allowed to kill him with a pistol. You gotta do it with a blade, or maybe your bare hands. What do you do then, huh? I mean everything tells you to kill him, right? To kill him, no matter what.”

“You kill the son of a bitch,” said the third man.

“I’m trying to ask a philosophical question here,” insisted the first man.

“A philosopher can’t tell you what to do,” I told him. “He can only explain the issues and values that are involved. But in the end, it’s up to you to decide what’s right. Choices such as the one you describe can be difficult.”

“Then, with all due respect, sir,” said the agent, “philosophy doesn’t sound like it’s any damned use to anyone.”

“It won’t give you absolution. If that’s what you want, you need to see a priest. But for what it’s worth, if it was me and I had the chance to kill Hitler with a blade or my bare hands, hell, I’d do it.”

Utilitarianism, pure and simple? The greatest happiness of the greatest number? I almost managed to convince myself. But not them. And noticing their enduring skepticism, I changed the subject, asking them their names. The one who had asked me what philosophy was made the introductions. Blond, blue-eyed, with a small scar on one cheek, he looked like a member of a German dueling society.

“The guy with the pipe is Jim Qualter. My name is John Pawlikowski. And the tall one is Wally Rauff.”

I pricked up my ears as I heard that last name. Walter Rauff was also the name of the Gestapo commander in Milan. But the agent didn’t look like he’d have welcomed the information.

That same evening I found myself invited up to the captain’s cabin to play gin rummy with Hopkins, General Arnold, and the president. Outside the cabin, Agent Rauff sat on a chair reading Kurt Kruger’s I Was Hitler’s Doctor. He glanced up as I appeared and, without saying anything, reached over and opened the door.

The ship’s captain, a man named John L. McCrea, was FDR’s former naval aide and a good friend. He had turned over his own cabin to the president. A number of alterations had been made to suit the man in the wheelchair. An elevator had been installed so that FDR could move easily from one deck to another. Ramps had been built over the coaxials and other deck obstructions. A new bath had been installed, and the mirror lowered to enable the president to shave while he was in his chair.

Roosevelt’s valet, Arthur Prettyman, had brought a number of items to help make McCrea’s largish but Spartan cabin a presidential home away from home. Not the least of these were FDR’s favorite reclining chair and some china and silver from the White House. Later, Hopkins told me that Prettyman had also brought along the president’s deep-sea fishing gear and several Walt Disney movies, including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and Pinocchio, which was Roosevelt’s personal favorite.

A proper card table had been erected, and the president, wearing old trousers, a thick fishing shirt, and a hunting vest containing cigarettes and the long-stemmed matches he favored, was already shuffling the cards.

“Come on in, Professor, and take a seat,” he said. “Arthur?” FDR turned to his black valet. “Get Professor Mayer a martini, would you, please?”

Prettyman nodded silently and retired to the rear of the cabin to prepare my cocktail. I hoped he hadn’t borrowed the recipe from the president.

“Did you bring some money to lose?” asked the president. “The stakes are ten cents a point. And I’m feeling lucky tonight.”

I thought it best not to mention that I had learned to count cards at Harvard. I had once written a small paper on probability theory as a generalization of Aristotelian logic. I wondered what the laws of etiquette were on taking money from the president of the United States in a card game.

“You’ve met Harry,” said FDR. “This is General Arnold.”

I nodded at the chief of the American Air Force, a largish, smug-looking man who, for all his extra size, seemed not much healthier than Hopkins: sweat was pouring from his brow and his color was not good.

“How are your quarters?” Arnold asked politely.

“Fine, sir. Thank you.”

“Hap hates the sea-don’t you, Hap?” said Hopkins, sitting down at the card table and pouring himself a glass of Saratoga Springs water. “Hates the sea and hates ships. I’ll deal first if you like, Mr. President.”

“Beats swimming, I guess,” growled Arnold.

“So what do you think of my ship?” FDR asked me.

“Very impressive.” I took the drink from Prettyman’s silver tray and sipped it cautiously. For once, it was perfect. “I’m almost sorry that I’m not going to see all these guns in action.”

“I don’t see why you shouldn’t see them in action,” said Roosevelt. “Come to think of it, a display of firepower might be good for morale. Let the crew know what kind of navy Hitler was fool enough to declare war on. What do you think, Harry?”

“You’re the navy man, Mr. President, not me. If I had a stomach I might look as bad as Hap here.”

“That true, Hap? Are you belly sick?”

“I’m fine, sir,” Arnold said gruffly.

Hopkins dealt the cards.

“I think the professor’s given me a good idea,” said FDR, picking up his hand and starting to sort it. “We’ll see how the Iowa can defend itself against an air attack. Shall I go first?”

FDR took the turned-up card and placed another on the discard pile.

The very next moment an enormous explosion rocked the ship and, seconds later, the door burst open to reveal Agent Rauff, gun in hand. “Are you okay, Mr. President?” he gasped.

“I’m fine, Wally,” Roosevelt said coolly.

Then, over the loudspeaker mounted in the corner of the cabin came the warning. “General stations. General stations. This is not a drill. Repeat, this is not a drill.”

“What the hell’s going on?” said Arnold.

“Sounds like we’re under attack,” said Roosevelt, not even looking up from his cards. “A submarine, perhaps.”

“Then I’d guess we’d better stay in here and out of the way,” said Arnold. “Let McCrea do his job.” Unperturbed, he drew a card from the stock pile and placed one on top of the discards.

Thinking I could hardly do less than General Arnold, I followed suit and found I could already make a sequence of four hearts.

“Go and find out what’s happening, Wally,” FDR told Rauff. “And for Christ’s sake, put that fucking gun away. This is a battleship, not Dodge City.”

“Yes, sir,” said Rauff, and holstering his weapon, he went out of the cabin to find Captain McCrea. The president took the five of spades I had just discarded and put down a diamond. “Thank you, Professor,” he muttered.

Arnold put down the spade I needed to make a group, which prompted me to count my three remaining cards. I might have knocked as soon as I had picked up Arnold’s card but by now I had guessed what the president was doing and, holding my remaining spade, I discarded a club and decided to hang on for gin. I felt anything but calm. Somewhere, a submarine might already have fired a second torpedo that even now was speeding inexorably toward the Iowa, but there was no sign of fear in Roosevelt’s demeanor. Any tension in the president’s face had to do with the card he had just drawn. Part of me wanted to put on a life vest; instead, I waited for Arnold to take his turn, and then picked up a card.

A moment later the door opened and Captain McCrea entered the cabin and stood to attention, although his uniform looked as if it might have managed this feat on its own. With his shiny shoes, shiny smile, shiny hair, shiny eyes, and shiny fingernails, McCrea was straight out of the box.

“Well, John,” said FDR, “are we under attack?”

“No, sir. A depth charge fell off the stern of one of our escort destroyers and detonated in the rough sea.”

“How the fuck is that possible?”

“It’s a little hard to say for sure, sir, while we’re maintaining radio silence for security reasons. But I would imagine someone didn’t set a safety the proper way.”

“Which ship was it?”

“The Willie D. Porter just flashed a signal to say it was them.”

“Jesus Christ, John, isn’t that the ship that backed into another ship while the Iowa was leaving Norfolk?”

“That’s right. Admiral King’s none too pleased about it, I can tell you.”

“I bet he’s not,” laughed Arnold.

“By the way, John,” Roosevelt said. “I’ve decided I’d like to see this ship demonstrate its firepower.”

“Maybe you could use the Willie D. for practice,” said Arnold.

“Ernie King would probably agree with you,” continued Roosevelt. “How about tomorrow morning, John?”

“Yes, sir,” grinned McCrea. “I’ll organize a display you won’t ever forget.”

“Since we’re not actually under attack,” said Arnold, “could we get back to the game?”

But as soon as McCrea had left the cabin, I knocked and spread my cards on the table. “Gin,” I said.

“I’ve got a better idea,” said FDR. “We’ll attach Willard to one of those weather balloons.”

An hour later, when I was more than fifty points ahead, Captain McCrea returned to inform the president that the convoy was stopping to search for a man overboard from the Willie D. Roosevelt looked grimly at the darkness outside the porthole and sighed. “Poor bastard. The man overboard, I mean. Hell of a night to fall overboard.”

“Look on the bright side,” suggested Hopkins. “Maybe it’s the guy who fucked up with the depth charge. Saves a court-martial.”

“Gentlemen,” said Roosevelt. “I think we had better conclude our game. Somehow it doesn’t seem right for us to continue playing gin rummy when a man on this convoy is missing and presumably drowned.”

With the game over, I returned to my cabin to find Ted Schmidt lying on his bunk, apparently insensible, but still holding the neck of the now empty bottle of Mount Vernon rye. I removed the bottle from Schmidt’s pudgy fingers and covered him with a blanket, wondering if his drinking was habitual or occasioned by fear of being abroad on the ocean in a battleship.

The next morning I left Schmidt to sleep it off and returned to “Presidential Country” to watch the barrage display from the flag bridge reserved for Roosevelt’s use during the voyage. Admirals Leahy, King, and McIntire (FDR’s physician) were already on the bridge, and we were soon joined by Generals Arnold, Marshall, Somervell, Deane, and George, as well as some diplomatic personnel I didn’t recognize. Last to arrive were Agents Rowley, Rauff, and Pawlikowski, Rear Admiral Wilson Brown, Harry Hopkins, John McCloy, the assistant secretary of war, Arthur Prettyman, and the president himself. He wore a regulation navy cape with velvet collar and braid frogs and a jaunty little hat with the brim turned up. He looked like a bookmaker going to his first opera.

“Good morning, gentlemen,” Roosevelt said brightly. He lit a cigarette and glanced over the rail at the secondary battery detector and the gunfire control station below. “Looks like we picked a nice day for it.”

The ship was just east of Bermuda on a moderate sea with pleasant weather. I was only feeling a little seasick. I trained my binoculars on the escort destroyers. The Iowa had been making twenty-five knots, but the three smaller destroyers-the Cogswell, the Young, and the Willie D. Porter — had found the pace hard going. I overheard Rear Admiral Brown telling the president that the Willie D. had lost power in one of its boilers.

“She’s not what you would call a lucky ship, is she?” observed the president.

Hearing a loud metallic clunking noise, I glanced down to see, immediately beneath me, one of the Iowa ’s nineteen 40-millimeter guns being loaded. A little further to my right, in front of the first uptake, a sailor was manning one of the ship’s sixty 20-millimeter guns. The weather balloons were launched and a minute or so later, when these had achieved a sufficient altitude, the antiaircraft batteries began to fire. If I’d been deaf, I think I would still have complained about the noise. As it was, I was too busy covering my ears with both hands and remained that way until the last of the balloons had been hit, or had drifted out of range toward the escort destroyers. It was then I noticed something unusual to starboard and turned toward Admiral King, a tall, slim-looking man who resembled a healthier version of Harry Hopkins.

“The Willie D. Porter appears to be signaling, sir,” I said, when the noise had finally abated.

King trained his binoculars on the flashing light and frowned as he tried to decipher the Morse code.

“What do they say, Ernie?” asked the president.

I had already read the message. The training at Catoctin Mountain had perhaps been better than I remembered. “They’re telling us to go into reverse at full speed.”

“That can’t be right.”

“Sir, that’s what they’re signaling,” I insisted.

“Doesn’t make sense,” muttered King. “What the hell does that idiot think he’s playing at now?”

A second or two later all became frighteningly clear. On the underside of the flag bridge, immediately beneath our feet, an enormous public-address system burst loudly to life. “Torpedo on the starboard quarter. This is not a drill. This is not a drill. Torpedo on the starboard quarter.”

“Jesus Christ!” yelled King.

Roosevelt turned to the Negro valet standing behind him. “Wheel me over to starboard, Arthur,” he said with the air of a man asking for a mirror to see himself in a new suit. “I want to take a look for myself.”

Meanwhile Agent Rowley drew his pistol and leaned over the side of the flag bridge as if to shoot the torpedo. I might have laughed if the possibility of being hit amidships and sunk had not seemed so likely. Suddenly the previous evening’s predicament of the Porter ’s man overboard seemed more immediate. Just how long could a man survive in the waters of the Atlantic Ocean? Half an hour? Ten minutes? Probably less than that if he was seated in a wheelchair.

The Iowa, taking evasive maneuvers, increased speed and began turning to port and, a long minute later, an enormous explosion threw up a mountain of water behind the battleship. The ship seesawed underfoot as if Archimedes had sat down in his bath and then got up again to answer the phone, and I felt the spray hit my face hard.

“Did you see that?” exclaimed the president. “Did you see that? It went straight by us. Couldn’t have been more than three hundred yards off our starboard side. My God, that was exciting. I wonder if it’s one sub or several.”

As a display of sangfroid, it ranked close to Jeanne d’Arc asking her executioner for a light.

“If it’s several, we’re screwed,” King said grimly and stormed his way to the bulkhead door, only to find Captain McCrea appearing on the flag deck in front of him.

“You’re not going to believe this, Admiral,” said McCrea. “It was the Willie D. that fired on us.”

Even as Captain McCrea spoke, the Iowa ’s big 16-inch guns were turning ominously in the direction of the Willie D.

“Commander Walter broke radio silence to warn us about the fish,” continued McCrea. “I’ve ordered our guns to take aim at them just in case this is some kind of assassination plot.”

“Jesus Christ,” snarled King, and, taking off his cap, he rubbed his bald head with exasperation. Meanwhile, Generals Arnold and Marshall were making a hard job of not smirking at the now obvious discomfort of their rival service. “That fucking idiot.”

“What are your orders, sir?”

“I’ll tell you what my goddamn orders are,” said King. “Order the commander of the Porter to detach his fucking ship from the escort and make all speed for Bermuda. There, he is to place his ship and his whole fucking crew under close arrest pending a full inquiry into what just happened here today, and a possible court-martial. And you can tell Lieutenant Commander Walter personally from me that I consider him the worst fucking naval officer commanding a ship I’ve come across in more than forty years of service.”

King turned toward the president and replaced his cap. “Mr. President. On behalf of the navy, I should like to offer you my apologies, sir, for what has happened. But I can assure you that I intend to get to the bottom of this incident.”

“I think we all nearly got to the bottom,” Marshall said to Arnold. “The bottom of the ocean.”

Back in the cabin I found Ted Schmidt sitting crapulously on the edge of his bunk, wearing his life vest and clutching a new bottle of rye. What do you do with a drunken sailor, I asked myself wearily. Giving him a taste of the bosun’s rope end, shaving his belly with a rusty razor, and even putting him in bed with the captain’s daughter were, all of them, solutions that came musically to mind.

“What’s happening?” hiccuped Schmidt. “I heard firing. Are we under attack?”

“Only by our own side,” I offered, and explained what had happened.

“Thank God.” Schmidt collapsed back on his bunk. “It would be just my luck on top of everything else that’s happened to get killed by my own side.”

I took the bottle from Schmidt and poured myself a drink. After the cold air of the flying bridge I needed something warm inside of me. “Would you care to talk about it?”

Schmidt shook his head, miserably.

“Look, Ted, this has got to stop. Getting tight is one thing. Getting shit-faced is quite another. Maybe the Russians at the Big Three will forgive you smelling like a bootlegger’s glove, but I don’t think the president will. What you need is a shave and a shower to scrub the sideboard off your breath. Every time you whistle I swear I’m halfway up Mount Vernon. After that, we’ll go find you a cup of strong coffee and some fresh air. Come on. I’ll hold your toilet bag.”

“Maybe you’re right.”

“Sure I’m right. If this were dry land, I’d feel duty bound to smack you in the mouth and confine you to your cabin. But since this is a ship, we’ll say that you’re seasick. That’s a perfectly respectable thing to be at sea. Besides, there are men, sober men, in command of destroyers, who are more incapable than you, Ted.”

When Schmidt had cleaned himself up and changed his clothes, we went forward. Only one man was in the mess when we got there. He was a lean, athletic-looking man wearing a Yale bow tie, a V-necked pullover, and half-moon glasses. There was a knife-edge crease to his gray flannels. His hair was short and silvery, and in his hand was a book as thick as a car tire. It was titled The Fountainhead. He had a distant manner and seemed to view our arrival with all the enthusiasm of a courtier finding a dog turd inside the gates of the Forbidden City. Schmidt introduced him.

“This is John Weitz,” he said.

I nodded, smiling affably, but hardly liking this man at all. Weitz nodded back and sent up a small puff of smoke as if signaling that he wasn’t particularly friendly. Meanwhile, a mess attendant announced that he would fetch a fresh pot of coffee.

“John’s the other Russian specialist they’ve sent from State,” added Schmidt.

It was a remark that provoked some indignation in John Weitz. The first, I was to learn, of a lot more where that had come from.

“Can you believe that?” Weitz said to me. “ Can you? The most important diplomatic event of the century and just two of us from the State Department.”

Having already learned Harry Hopkins’s low opinion of State, I could believe it only too easily. And John Weitz seemed hardly the type to restore the reputation of the department in the eyes of Hopkins.

“It seems to me,” said Schmidt, “that the president has a dog but wants to wag the tail himself.”

Weitz nodded, angrily. This show of agreement between the two Russian specialists did not, however, extend to how the Soviet Union ought to be treated as an ally of the United States, and it wasn’t long before a heated discussion was under way. I kept out of it for the most part, not because I disliked political arguments but because it seemed to me there was something personal about this particular argument. Something that wasn’t quite explained by the simple fact that John Weitz was a shit.

“It sticks in my throat that the president is going to shake Stalin’s hand,” Weitz confessed.

“Why the hell shouldn’t the president shake Stalin’s hand?” Schmidt asked. “The Russians are our allies, for Christ’s sake. That’s what you do when you’ve made an alliance. You shake hands on it.”

“And it doesn’t bother you that Stalin signed the death warrant on ten thousand Polish officers? Some ally.” Weitz relit his pipe, but before the still hungover Schmidt could answer, he added, “Some ally, one that tries to make a separate peace with Germany. That’s the only reason there hasn’t been a Big Three before now.”

“Nonsense.” Schmidt was rubbing his eyes furiously.

“Is it? The Russian ambassador to Stockholm, Madame de Kollontay, has been practically sleeping with von Ribbentrop’s representative, Peter Kleist, since the beginning of the year.”

Schmidt looked at Weitz with contempt. “Bullshit.”

“I don’t think you understand the Russian mentality at all,” Weitz continued. “Let’s not forget that the Ivans have made a separate peace with the Germans before. In 1918, and again in 1939.”

“Maybe that’s true,” said Schmidt, “but things are very different now. The Russians have every reason to trust us.”

“Hey, I’m not saying they can’t trust us, ” laughed Weitz. “The question is, can we trust them?”

“We promised Stalin a second front in 1942, and again in 1943, and look where we are now. There won’t be a second front before August of next year. How many more Red Army soldiers will die before then? A million? Stalin can be forgiven for thinking that he’s fighting this war by himself.”

“All the more reason, then, for him to negotiate a separate peace,” insisted Weitz. “It’s hard to imagine any country being able to sustain losses like that and want to go on fighting.”

“I might agree with you if the Red Army had lost the initiative. But they haven’t.”

Even as the two men argued, I had thought of a better reason why Stalin might just have been inclined to sue for peace: his greatest fear was not the Germans but the Russians themselves. He must have been terrified that his own army would mutiny against the appalling conditions and high casualties, just as it had in 1917. Stalin knew he was sitting on a powder keg. And yet what choice did he have?

John Weitz could only see the Soviet Union as a potential aggressor. “You mark my words,” he said. “Stalin is coming to this Big Three with a shopping list of countries he thinks he can occupy permanently without a shot being fired. And Poland is at the top of the list. If he thought that Hitler would agree to those demands, believe me, he’d make a deal with him even while he was shaking FDR’s hand. You ask me, we should let them both bleed white. Let the Nazis and Communists kill each other off and then pick up the pieces.”

By now the argument had grown very bad-tempered. And personal, too.

“Hell, it’s no wonder the Russians don’t trust us with bastards like you around,” yelled Schmidt.

“I think I’d rather be a bastard than an apologist for a murdering swine like Stalin. Who knows? Maybe you’re worse than that, Ted. You wouldn’t be the first fellow traveler at State.”

Schmidt stood up abruptly, his fists clenched and his soft, clean-shaven face quivering with anger. For a moment I thought that he would strike Weitz, and I and the two mess attendants who were on duty had to move quickly to intervene before actual blows were exchanged.

“You heard what he called me,” Schmidt protested to me.

“Looks like I hit a nerve,” grinned Weitz.

“Maybe you should shut up,” I suggested.

“And maybe you should be more careful about the company you keep,” replied Weitz.

“That’s good coming from you, you faggot,” said Schmidt.

Given the situation in the State Department-Sumner Welles, and then Thornton Cole-this was not an insult that John Weitz was likely to let pass, and before either I or the mess attendants could prevent him, he had punched Ted Schmidt hard on the nose-hard enough to make his nose bleed. He would have punched Schmidt again, too, but for the intervention of myself and one of the mess attendants.

“I’m going to kill him,” he yelled, repeating the threat several times.

“I’d like to see you try, you faggot,” grinned Schmidt, wiping his bleeding nose with his handkerchief.

The noise of this fracas brought Agents Rauff and Pawlikowski into the mess as Schmidt and Weitz continued to abuse and threaten each other.

“If you two gentlemen are supposed to be diplomats,” said Pawlikowski, pushing Weitz up against the cabin wall when he tried to hit Schmidt again, “then God help us all.”

Rauff looked at Schmidt and then at me. “I think you’d better get him out of here,” he said. “Before the president or any of the Joint Chiefs come in here.”

“Good advice,” I said, and took a firm hold of Schmidt’s arm and moved him smoothly toward the mess room door. “Come on, Ted,” I said. “He’s right. We don’t want the president seeing this. Let’s go back to the quarters.”

“He called me a faggot,” was the last thing I heard from Weitz as I closed the door behind us.

When we were back in the cabin, Schmidt sat down on his bunk and reached for his bottle.

“Don’t you think you’ve had enough of that stuff?” I snapped. “What the hell’s the matter with you, anyway? And why on earth did you call Weitz a faggot?”

Schmidt shook his head and laughed. “I just wanted to get to him. Stick some mud on that Fascist bastard. People around State are kind of nervous about the possibility of there being some kind of organized pansy hunt. God forbid they should ever find a queer who’s also a Communist. They’d probably lynch him from the top of the Washington Monument.”

I had to admit there was some truth in that.

Schmidt was silent for a minute. Then he said, “Are you married, Willard?”

This struck a nerve as I remembered how the president and perhaps the Metro police had asked me the same thing.

“What, are you going to call me a faggot, too? Is that it?”

Schmidt looked pained. “Good Lord, no.” He shook his head. “I was just asking.”

“No, I’m not fucking married.” I shook my head bitterly. “I had a girl. A really nice girl. A girl I should have married. And now-well, now she’s gone. I’m not exactly sure why or even how, but I blew it.” I shrugged. “I miss her a lot. More than I thought possible.”

“I see.” Schmidt nodded. “Then we’re in the same boat.”

“Not for much longer if you carry on like you did just now. They’ll put you off at the next desert island.”

Schmidt smiled, his pudgy face a mixture of sympathy and irony. I didn’t much care for the sympathy, but the irony looked interesting.

“You don’t understand,” he said, taking off his glasses and cleaning them furiously. “The day before I came on this ship, my wife, Debbie, told me that she was going to leave me.” He swallowed hard and chipped me another twitching smile. It landed right on top of the large bag of self-pity I’d been carrying ever since coming on board the Iowa.

“I’m sorry.” I sat down and poured us both a drink. Short of fetching the ship’s chaplain, it seemed like the proper thing to do. “Did she say why?”

“She’s been having an affair. I guess if I’m honest, I knew she was up to something. She was always out somewhere. I didn’t want to ask, you know? In case my worst suspicions were confirmed. And now they are.”

He took the drink and stared at it as if he knew it wasn’t the answer. So I lit a cigarette and fed it between Schmidt’s lips.

“Do you know the other guy?”

“I did know him.” He smiled sheepishly as he caught my eye registering his use of past tense. “It’s a little more complicated than you might suppose. But I have to tell someone, I guess. Can you keep this to yourself, Willard?”

“Of course. You have my word.”

Schmidt swallowed the drink and then took a suicidally long drag on his cigarette.

“The other man is dead.” He smiled bitterly and added, “She’s leaving me for a dead man, Willard. Can you beat that?”

I shook my head. I couldn’t even get near to beating it. I didn’t even know the name of the guy I’d seen with Diana on the rug in her living room.

Schmidt snorted with laughter and then wiped tears from his eyes. “Not just any dead man, mind you. No, she had to pick the most infamous dead man in Washington.”

I frowned as I tried to figure out who Ted Schmidt could have been referring to. There was only one infamous dead man in Washington I could think of whom Ted Schmidt might have known. “Jesus, Ted, you don’t mean Thornton Cole.”

Schmidt nodded. “I do mean Thornton Cole.”

“But wasn’t he…?”

“That’s what the Metro police said. I did some checking. They’re working on the assumption that Cole went to Franklin Park to have sex with a male prostitute, who then robbed and murdered him. But you can take it from me, Thornton Cole was certainly not homosexual.”

“And you know that for sure?”

“Debbie is carrying his baby. I know that for sure. We hadn’t made love in a very long time. Cole is the father, all right. It’s all in the letter she wrote me the day before I got on this stinking tub.”

“You say you haven’t told anyone else about this.”

Schmidt shook his head. “No one else knows. Except you.”

“Well, don’t you think you should tell someone? The police?”

“Oh, sure. I want everyone in Washington to know that another man was fucking my wife. Yes, good idea, Willard. Like I said, I only just found out about it myself. And who am I going to tell? The captain?”

“You’re right. There’s never a cop around when you need one.” I shrugged. “How about the Secret Service?”

“Then what? We’re maintaining radio silence, remember?”

“You’re going to have to tell someone. A man was murdered, Ted. If the Metro cops knew Cole was having an affair with your wife, they could hardly treat the murder as some kind of pansy thing. There must be more to it than that.”

Schmidt laughed. “Sure. Maybe they’ll think it was domestic. That I killed him. Have you thought about that? I tell them what I know and the next thing, I’m a suspect. I’m not so sure Debbie doesn’t think I had something to do with it, anyway. Because I would have killed him if I’d had the opportunity, not to mention the guts. I can just see it. I tell those guys and I’ll find myself arrested the minute I step off this ship.” He shook his head. “Secret Service, FBI. I don’t trust any of these bastards. The only reason I’m talking to you is because we knew each other at Harvard. Sort of.” Schmidt brought the glass up to his lips before he realized he’d already drunk the contents. “I’m not a drunk, Willard. I don’t normally drink. But what else do you do in a case like this?”

“Don’t ask me. I’m a stranger here myself.” I poured us both another. What the hell, I thought, we were brothers in suffering.

“Besides, there’s another reason I don’t want the Secret Service and the FBI crawling all over my life. Something John Weitz said.”

“Oh, forget him.”

“I’ve always sympathized with the Communist movement, Will. Ever since Harvard. I guess that does make me a sort of fellow traveler, just like he said.”

“It’s one thing to sympathize and quite another to belong,” I told him firmly. He may have outranked me in human suffering, but I wasn’t going to let him outrank me in political radicalism. “You never belonged to the Communist Party, did you?”

“No, of course not. I never had the guts to join.”

“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. Since Pearl, we’re all fellow travelers. That’s the only decent line to take. That’s what this Big Three is all about. John Weitz needs to remember that. I don’t think FDR would appreciate some of the things he said in the mess just now. And I happen to know for a fact that your views about the Soviet Union are pretty much in accordance with the president’s.”

“Thanks, Willard.”

“You know, some of the president’s Secret Service detail. They’re not so bad.”

“You really think I should tell them what I know?”

“Yes. Let me tell you why. Thornton Cole worked on the German desk, right?”

Schmidt nodded. “I didn’t know him well, but by all accounts he was pretty good at his job.”

“Have you considered the possibility that there’s a security aspect to this whole story? Maybe he found out something that was connected to his German work at State. Could be that’s what got him killed.”

“You mean, like a German spy?”

“Why not? A year ago the FBI picked up eight German spies in New York. The Long Island spy ring? But there must be others. That’s one of the things that keeps Hoover in a job.”

“I never thought of that.”

“In which case, and I hate to say this, but it’s just possible that Debbie might be in some danger, too. Perhaps she knows something. Something about Thornton Cole. Something that could get her killed.” I shrugged. “Assuming you don’t actually want her dead, that is.”

“I still love her, Will.”

“Yeah. I know what that feels like.”

“So which one of the agents do you think I should speak to? I mean, you’ve spoken to some of them, right?”

I thought about my previous day’s conversation on the subject of “What is philosophy?”

“I don’t know. Agent Rauff seems quite intelligent,” I said, recalling one of their names. And then another. “Pawlikowski isn’t such a bad guy.”

“For a Polack,” laughed Schmidt.

“You got something against Polacks?” I asked.

“Me, I’m German, like you,” replied Schmidt. “We’ve got something against nearly everyone.”