Hitler's peace

XX

Coogan picked me up from Shepheard’s at eight-fifteen and we drove west. There were police milling about in Ezbekiah Gardens. With the green grass, and the men in their white uniforms, it looked more like a game of cricket than a murder investigation, and was probably just as baffling.

“Shot right between the eyes, so he was, about two-thirty last night, just after the pictures was finished,” said Coogan. “Local businessman, apparently. Nobody saw or heard a thing, of course. And the police don’t know anything. But that’s not very surprising.” He laughed. “The police never know anything in Cairo. There are five million people live in Cairo. Finding a murderer in this city is like trying to find a needle in a haystack.”

There were a number of reasons I had decided that it was best to keep my mouth shut about what had happened the previous night. One was that I didn’t think FDR, Hopkins, or Donovan would have welcomed any member of the American delegation getting involved with the local police. Another was that after my run-in with the Secret Service in Tunis, I wanted to keep a low profile. But the main reason I had kept silent was that I had no evidence for what I now believed: that the attempt on my life was connected with the death of Ted Schmidt. Ted’s killer must surely have reasoned that suspicions would have been raised by another death aboard the Iowa. Killing me in Cairo would have been a lot easier than trying to kill me on the ship.

We drove across the English Bridge, and then south, toward Giza. Cairo’s city buildings gave way to mud-brick villages, strong-smelling canals, and fields recently harvested of their beans. We passed the university and the Cairo Zoo, as well as a caravanserai of domesticated animals on the Giza Road: donkeys adorned with blue beads to ward off the evil eye, nervous flocks of sheep, scrawny horses that pulled ancient open-topped carriages, the gharries that plied the tourist trade all over Cairo, and, once or twice, camels carrying so many palm branches they looked like Birnam Wood come to Dunsinane. It would have been a colorful scene except for the flat white light that lay on the city like a layer of dust, draining the color out of almost everything. I felt a little drained myself. Being shot at wasn’t good for my plumbing. But then again maybe that was just Cairo.

Mena House stood a stone’s throw from the Pyramids. The former hunting lodge of the Egyptian khedive, it was now a luxurious hotel where Churchill, Roosevelt, and Chiang Kai-shek were meeting. The whole area bustled with troops, armored cars, tanks, and antiaircraft guns, and the strictest cordons guarded all of the approaches to the hotel and its extensive grounds.

Mena House looked very different from Shepheard’s. Surrounded by lawns and palm trees and shrubberies, only the Great Pyramid spoiled the view. From the outside, it resembled some grand movie star’s Hollywood mansion. I preferred the more cosmopolitan atmosphere of Shepheard’s. But it was easy to see why the British military had favored a conference at Mena House. With just the desert and a few pyramids for neighbors, the former hunting lodge was easily defended. Not that the Western allies were taking any chances. There were four antiaircraft positions on the lawns, and truckloads of British and American troops, stiff with boredom and parked in the cool shade of some breezy palm trees. Everyone looked as if they were praying for a plague of locusts, just so that they might have something to practice shooting at.

I got out of the car and stepped onto a long verandah. The several steps leading up to the front door were equipped with a ramp, and inside the hotel’s cool interior were yet more ramps to accommodate Roosevelt’s wheelchair.

An officer at the front desk directed me to Hopkins’s office, and I walked through the hotel with its fine Mashrabia wooden screens, blue tiles and mosaics, and brass-embossed wooden doors. But for the large fireplaces, which added an English touch to the decor, everything looked very Egyptian. As I sauntered down a long corridor, a small man in a white linen suit came out of a room and then walked toward me. The man was wearing a gray hat, a gray summer-weight suit, and smoking a very large cigar. It took less than a moment to register that this was Winston Churchill. The prime minister growled a “Good morning” at me as he passed.

“Good morning, Prime Minister,” I said, surprised that he would have bothered speaking to me at all.

I hurried on down the corridor and found Harry Hopkins in a room that had the air of a seraglio, with arabesque arches, more Mashrabia screens, and brass lamps. But instead of some grande odalisque, or even a small one, Hopkins was with Mike Reilly and another, patrician-looking man I half recognized.

“Professor Mayer,” said Hopkins, smiling warmly. “There you are.” I was still a couple of minutes early, but he sounded as if they were about to send out a search party. “This is Chip Bohlen, from State. He came with Averell Harriman, from the embassy in Moscow. Mr. Bohlen speaks fluent Russian.”

“That’s going to come in handy,” I said, shaking Bohlen’s outstretched hand.

“Chip here’s been defending State against me,” grinned Hopkins. “Explaining all the handicaps that State Department officials have to put up with. By the way, it seems he knew your friend Ted Schmidt and his wife.”

“I still can’t believe he’s dead. Or Debbie, for that matter. I went to their wedding,” Bohlen said.

“Then you knew them well,” I said.

“I knew them very well. Ted and I joined the Russian-language program at State around the same time and studied together in Paris. That’s where most of our officers were sent for language study. After that we went to Estonia together, to get the sound and feel of spoken Russian, and shared an apartment for a while before he went back to Washington.” Bohlen shook his head. “Mr. Hopkins says you think they were both murdered.”

I tried not to look surprised. I had shared my suspicions regarding the death of Deborah Schmidt only with General Donovan and Ridgeway Poole in Tunis.

“We received a radio message for you from your people in Washington,” explained Reilly. “I’m afraid that after what happened in Tunis I read it.”

“You mean in case I really was a German spy?” I said.

“Something like that.” Reilly grinned.

He handed me the message from the Campus. I read it quickly. There was more information about the traffic accident that had ended Debbie Schmidt’s life. On Monday, October 18, she had been killed by a hit-and-run driver as she came out of Jelleff’s, the ladies’ store on F Street. The Georgetown apartment where the Schmidts lived had been turned over, too, and the Metro police were treating her death as suspicious.

“Why would anyone want to kill Debbie Schmidt?” asked Bohlen.

“Because Debbie Schmidt had been having an affair with someone,” I explained. “That’s what Ted told me, anyway. Only Ted told someone else, as well. Someone aboard the Iowa. I think that someone killed him. I think the murderer also tricked his way into the radio room on board the ship and sent a message back to the States. My guess is that the message contained Mrs. Schmidt’s home address and a request to get rid of her.”

Bohlen was frowning. “He said as much to me when he was in Moscow for the conference. That she was having an affair.”

“Ted was in Moscow? With Cordell Hull?”

Bohlen nodded.

“I didn’t know that.”

“He was drinking a bit too much-well, it’s hard not to when you’re with the Soviets-and he said he had his suspicions then. He didn’t say who it was. Only that I knew the man. And that it was someone in the State Department.”

“Did he tell you who it was?” Reilly asked me.

“Yes, he did.” I could see no reason now to keep any of this a secret any longer. Certainly not now that the police were involved in both Washington and Cairo. “It was Thornton Cole.”

I waited for their expressions of surprise to subside. Then I said: “The fact that Deborah Schmidt was pregnant by Cole only seems to make it much less likely he could have been looking for homosexual sex when he was murdered in Franklin Park.”

“I see what you mean,” said Reilly.

“I’m glad someone does. I was beginning to think I just had a dirty mind. Ted and I talked this over. We both concluded that in the wake of the Sumner Welles scandal, whoever murdered Cole wanted to make sure it would be swept under the rug as quickly as possible. So the murderer made Cole’s death look as if he’d been having sex with a man in a public place. Given that Cole worked on the German desk at State, it’s possible he was on the trail of some kind of Washington spy ring.”

“Why didn’t you come forward with this information before?” demanded Reilly.

“With respect, you weren’t on the ship, Mr. Reilly,” said Hopkins, coming to my defense. “The professor here was hardly the most popular man on the Iowa when he suggested that Schmidt might have been murdered, and that there was a German spy on board.”

“Besides,” I said, “I could hardly be sure that whoever I told wasn’t the person who killed Schmidt. In which case I might have been murdered, too.” I paused a moment. “Last night I damn nearly was.”

“What?” Hopkins glanced at the other two men. They looked as astonished as he did.

“Murdered.”

“You don’t say,” he breathed.

“I do say. Underlined and in italics. Someone took a shot at me last night. Fortunately for me it missed. Unfortunately for someone else, it didn’t. There’s a body in Ezbekiah Gardens right now that should be me.” I lit a cigarette and sat down in an armchair. “I figure whoever killed the Schmidts wants to kill me as well. Just in case Ted told me about Thornton Cole.”

“Are the police involved?” asked Reilly.

I smiled. “Of course the police are involved. Even in Cairo they know to look for someone with a gun when they find a man lying in the park with a bullethole between his eyes.” I inhaled sharply. I was almost enjoying their horror. “The police just aren’t involved with me, if that’s what you mean. I didn’t hang around the crime scene. I tend not to when someone has fired a shot at me. With a silencer.”

“A silencer?” Hopkins looked puzzled.

“You know-the little gizmo you put on the end of your gun to make it go phut phut instead of bang bang. Very useful when you want to make sure you don’t disturb people while they’re watching a movie.” I shrugged. “There was that, and I also thought it best if the president’s delegation stayed out of the picture, for now.”

“You did the right thing,” said Reilly.

I nodded. “At least until someone tries again. Our German agent, perhaps. If that’s who it was.”

“So why talk now?” asked Reilly. “To us?”

“Because neither you nor Bohlen here were on the ship, of course. Ergo, you couldn’t have done it. As for Mr. Hopkins, I hardly think that the president’s best friend is likely to be a German spy. I’ve played gin rummy with him. He’s not that good a bluffer. No one in this room could possibly be involved.”

Hopkins was nodding, good-humoredly.

“So what do you want us to do now?” asked Reilly. “After all, it’s possible this German spy might be planning an attempt on the president’s life.”

“I don’t think so. An assassin hardly lacked for an opportunity to kill Roosevelt when we were still on board ship. It’s safe to assume that our spy has something else in mind. Perhaps-and this is only a guess-perhaps he’s not an assassin at all. Perhaps the Germans want their own man in Teheran. To take the measure of the alliance. To see if there’s any room for future diplomatic maneuver. I can give you all kinds of reasons if I sit here long enough.”

“Do we tell the president?” Hopkins asked. “Mike?”

Mike Reilly had a look on his face that suggested he’d hit a brick wall. I kicked his thought processes aside and pressed on with my own. “For now I’d like to keep this between the four of us. Perhaps the Metro Police in D.C. will turn up something more that will help us get a lead on this guy.”

“Under the circumstances, this might be a job for the FBI. What do you say, Mike?”

“I’m inclined to agree, sir.”

Reilly’s brain. You could almost see it jerking around in his skull, as if Hopkins had tapped it with a small reflex hammer. I smiled, trying to contain my irritation with them both.

“That’s your call. But my feeling would be not to mention this to anyone until we know a little more. We wouldn’t want to spook anyone. Especially the president.”

“It sounds to me as though you might already suspect someone,” said Reilly.

I had obviously thought about this. There was John Weitz, who had threatened to kill Ted Schmidt. And there were some of Reilly’s colleagues in the Secret Service. On the night he disappeared from the Iowa, Schmidt had asked the chief petty officer to direct him to the Secret Service quarters. Could one of them have lured him up on deck to kill him? Disliking almost all of them, I was finding it hard to fix on one particular suspect. Agent Rauff had a name he shared with a Gestapo commander. Agent Pawlikowski looked like one of Hitler’s blond beasts. And hadn’t Agent Qualter expressed what seemed to be the popular view, that Stalin was as bad as Hitler? Killing Stalin, killing Roosevelt, killing the Big Three, or just trying to take the measure of the alliance-there was no shortage of possible motives for a German spy among our number.

“Maybe,” I told Reilly. “Maybe not. But I’d still like to keep the lid on this for a while. In the hope that our man might reveal himself. Getting the FBI involved might prevent that from happening.”

“All right,” agreed Reilly. “We’ll do it your way, Professor. But just in case, we’ll double the detail guarding the president.”

“Keep us posted, Professor,” Hopkins told me as I went out the door. “If there are any developments, let us know immediately.”

“If someone shoots me, you’ll know I wasn’t exaggerating,” I told him.

I went back outside to my car. All that talk about a German spy had prompted me to recall my own secretly precarious situation. It was time I checked to see how Major Reichleitner was coming along with Donovan’s Bride.

“Where to, boss?” asked Coogan.

“Grey Pillars.”

I had left a five-pound note with the duty corporal to provide cigarettes, medicine, and some decent food and water for the prisoner. Entering the cell, I found the major much recovered and working diligently on Donovan’s Bride material. Thanking me for the extra supplies, he told me he was making excellent progress with the signals transcripts and he might have some plaintexts to show me by the end of the week.

“Good. Sounds as though it will be just in time. We’re flying to Teheran on Saturday morning.”

“So it is Teheran. But don’t they know? The place is full of German sympathizers.”

I shrugged. “I tried telling them. But I’m beginning to suspect FDR thinks he walks on water.”

“On water, no,” said Reichleitner. “But on oil, perhaps. If they’re having the conference there it’s because they’ll all be trying to get the shah to commit to a cheap oil price, in perpetuity.”

“Maybe he can give me a good deal on a rug while he’s at it.”

“By the way. Did you give Roosevelt the Beketovka File?”

“Not yet.” What with seeing Elena again, and being shot at, I had forgotten all about the file now lying on a table in my hotel room. “I’m still trying to get some time with the president so I can bring it to his attention.”

“But you’ve read it yourself.”

“Of course,” I said, thinking I could hardly say I hadn’t and still retain the German’s goodwill. I resolved to try to read the file the moment I got back to Shepheard’s.

“And what do you think?”

“It’s shocking. I think it confirms what a lot of people in this city seem to believe already. That Stalin is as great a threat as Hitler.”

Reichleitner nodded his approval. “He is. He is.”

“To be honest with you, though, I’m not sure it’s going to have much of an immediate influence on Roosevelt. After all, he managed to ignore all the evidence about Katyn.”

“But this time the numbers are so much greater. It’s evidence of a pattern of mass murder and neglect on an industrial scale. If Roosevelt can make an alliance with a man like Stalin, then there’s no reason why he couldn’t make a deal with Hitler himself.”

I nodded uncomfortably. I wondered what Max Reichleitner would have said if I had told him what Donovan had told me: that FDR was indeed pursuing an American peace with Hitler. I told myself he wouldn’t have believed a word of it.

When I got back to Shepheard’s, I picked up the Beketovka File, feeling guilty about the lie I had told. I moved the armchair near the open window, but in the shade. I put a package of cigarettes on the side table next to a cold beer, my notebook, and my fountain pen. Then I dived in. It was a like diving into a dark pond to find that there was something unseen just beneath the opaque surface, like a rusty iron bedstead. The hidden object was a monograph by Heinrich Zahler. I hit my head on it. Hard.

My name is Heinrich Zahler and I was a lieutenant in the 76th Infantry Division of the German 6th Army that surrendered to the Soviets on January 31, 1943. I was born in Bremen, on March 1, 1921, but I don’t expect to live to see Bremen again or, for that matter, my next birthday. I am writing now in the hope that this secretly written letter (if these writing materials are discovered, I will be executed immediately) will reach my parents. My father, Friedrich, works for the docks and harbor board in Bremerhaven, and my mother, Hannah, is a midwife at the University Hospital in Bremen. I want to tell them how very much I love them both and to abandon any hope of ever seeing me again. Death is the only escape from this, the deepest pit in hell. Attempts to take POWs out of Stalingrad began immediately after we surrendered, when the Popovs had tired of beating us. But almost all the rolling stock was required to supply the Russian front at Rostov, and so most of us were obliged to march to the camp where we are now imprisoned. Some were loaded into cattle-trucks awaiting the arrival of a steam locomotive that never came, and after a week the cars were opened again and it was discovered that all of the men inside, some 3,000 officers and private personnel, were dead. But thousands more died of typhus, dysentery, frostbite, and wounds received in the battle before they could even leave the provisional POW camp at Stalingrad. In retrospect, they were the lucky ones. The march to the camp that was to be our final destination took five days. We walked in all weathers, without food or water or any kind of shelter. Those who could not walk were shot or clubbed to death, or sometimes just stripped and left to freeze to death. Many thousands more died on the march here. And perhaps they were lucky, too. This is the largest of the Russian POW camps-Camp Number 108, at Beketovka. It is what the Russians call a katorga. That means hard labor, low rations, and no medical attention other than that which we can provide for ourselves, which is very little. The site of the camp was formerly a school, but it is hard to believe that children could ever have been educated in such a place as this. The school was partly destroyed during the battle for Stalingrad, which means that there are no windows, no doors, and no beds; there is no roof or furniture of any kind; anything made of wood was burned long ago to provide heat for Red Army soldiers. The only fuel we have is our own dried human feces. We sleep on the floor, without blankets, huddled together for warmth in temperatures as low as -35 degrees centigrade. When we arrived, there was no food or water, and many men died from eating snow. After two days they gave us a kind of watery bran that a horse or a dog would have ignored; even today, months after our arrival, none of us eats more than a few ounces of bread a day-if bread is what it is: this bread has more grit in it than the soles on a roadworker’s boots. Sometimes, as a special treat, we boil potato peelings for soup, and whenever we can, we smoke the dust off the floor-a Russian solution to the problem of the lack of tobacco, which they call “scratch.” Every morning when we pick ourselves off the floor we discover that as many as fifty of us have died during the night. A week after my arrival here I awoke to find that Sergeant Eisenhauer, a man who saved my life on more than one occasion, was dead and frozen hard to the ground, and hardly recognizable, for the rats feast on the extremities of the dead in the short time that remains before they become petrified with cold. It is not just the rats that eat human flesh in this place, however. Sometimes bodies disappear and are cooked and eaten. The cannibals among us are easily spotted by their healthier pallor and shunned by the rest of us. Otherwise, the morning always starts with bodies dragged out of the building where we sleep and, to ensure that death has not been feigned, the Popovs drive a metal spike into the skull of each corpse with a hammer. The clothes are then stripped off the body, any gold fillings removed with pliers and (for several months, until the ground unfroze) the bodies laid out on the styena — which is what the Popovs call the wall they have built from the naked corpses of our dead comrades. Our guards are not soldiers, all of them are needed for the front, but the zakone, common criminals who were serving sentences in other labor camps and whose brutality and depravity know no limit. I believed that I had witnessed all of the evil that men were capable of inflicting upon one another during the battle for Stalingrad. That was before I came to Camp 108. By the end of May, those of us who still remained alive at Beketovka were put to work rebuilding-first the camp itself, and then the local railway station. Winter had been bad, and many of us who survived it assumed that summer could only improve our lot-at least we would be warm. But with the summer came a heat that was no less intolerable than the cold. Worst of all were the mosquitoes. Whereas before I saw men stripped naked and forced to stand in the snow until they died (this is called oontar paydkant — “winter punishment”), now I see men bound naked to a tree and left to the mosquitoes until they screamed to be shot (this is called samap paydkant, “summer punishment”); sometimes they were shot, but mostly the mosquitoes were left to do their ghastly work, for a bullet is wasted on a German, say the zaks. In truth, however, I have seen my comrades die in all manner of revolting ways. A corporal from my own platoon was thrown into a cesspit and left to drown in excrement. His crime? He asked a zak for some water. A friend of mine, Helmut von Dorff, a lieutenant from the 6th Panzer Army, was executed for going to the assistance of a comrade who had fallen at work under the weight of the railway sleeper he was obliged to carry on his shrunken shoulder. The zaks tied von Dorff to a telegraph pole and rolled it down a steep hill into the river Volga, where, presumably, he drowned. Punishments other than death are rare indeed, but those that do exist are unusually cruel and often fatal anyway to men severely weakened by starvation, overwork, and dysentery. One man, so emaciated from lack of food his buttocks had virtually disappeared, was beaten on the bones of his behind until they were through the skin and flesh, and he died soon afterward from infection; but for the most part, beatings are so routine they hardly count as punishment, and the zaks like to devise new ways of enforcing their idea of discipline. This was the way they punished a Luftwaffe sergeant from the 9th Flak Division: they locked him inside a coffin-shaped box in which thousands of lice had been allowed to multiply and left him there for twenty-four hours; when they removed the lid, his body had swollen up so much from his bites that they could not pry him from the box and had to break off one side of it, much to the amusement of the zaks. Here is another: a staff officer from the 371st Infantry Division-I do not remember his name-they put a long piece of rope in his mouth, like a bridle, pulled the ends over his shoulders and tied them to his wrists and ankles; they left him on his stomach like that for a whole day, without water, and he has never walked since. Morality has no meaning in a place like this. It is a word that does not exist in Beketovka, perhaps nowhere in all of Russia. Even so, there are times when I cannot help but think that we brought these misfortunes on ourselves by invading this country. Our leaders took us here and then abandoned us. And yet I am still proud to be a German and proud of the way we have conducted ourselves. I love my Fatherland but I fear what is to come, for if the Red Army were ever to conquer Germany, who knows what sufferings might be inflicted on our kith and kin? It does not bear thinking about. There were 50,000 of us who marched from Stalingrad to Beketovka-since then as many as 45,000 have died. I have learned from Germans transferred from other camps that in these, too, it is the same story. Those who died were the best of us for, strange as it might seem, often the strongest died first. For myself, I will not survive another winter; already I am sick. There is a rumor that I am to be sent to another camp-perhaps Camp 93 at Tyumen, in Omsk Province, or Oransky Number 74 in Gorky Province; but I don’t think I will live to complete the journey. I would write more but cannot as I fear discovery; but there is no end to what could be written about this dreadful place. To whoever is reading this, I ask you, when the opportunity presents itself, please say a prayer for those like me whose deaths in this place will go unnoticed; and for those less fortunate souls who remain alive. God bless you, dear reader. And God bless the Fatherland. I ask forgiveness of all those I have wronged. They know who they are. I do not know the date, but I think it must be late September 1943. Heinrich Zahler

Lieutenant

76th Infantry,

Camp Number 108

Beketovka.

I went to the hotel balcony and put my face in the sun just to remind myself I was still alive. Between the jumbled rooftops and the minarets, elegantly tall palm trees swayed in the warm breeze that swept off the Nile. In the street below, the Cairo traffic was going about its reassuringly argumentative business. I took a deep breath of air and tasted gasoline, sweat, Turkish coffee, horse dung, and cigarettes. It tasted good. Beketovka seemed like a million miles away, on another planet. I couldn’t think of a better antidote to Camp 108 than Cairo, with its smelly drains and its dirty postcards.

The smart thing to have done would have been to leave it alone. Not to get personally involved. Except that I was involved. So instead of doing the smart thing and lying to Reichleitner-telling him I had given the file to FDR-I decided that I had to talk to someone about what I had read. And I could think of no one better than the major himself. But first I went down to the Long Bar and asked the head barman if they had a bottle of Korn. He said they had several because there was no demand for German liquor among the British. It wasn’t that the English didn’t like the taste, just that they didn’t know such a thing even existed. I gave the man a couple of pounds and told him to bring me a bottle and two small glasses. Then I put it inside my briefcase and had Coogan drive me back to Grey Pillars.

Major Reichleitner was at work on the ciphers. He looked a little tired. But his eyes widened when he saw the bottle.

“My God, Furst Bismarck,” he said. “I don’t believe it.”

I produced the two glasses, placed them on the table, and filled each to the brim. We toasted each other silently and then drained the glass. The German mixed-grain liquor slipped into my body as if it had been something that belonged there, like my own heart and my lungs. I sat down on the bed and lit us both a cigarette.

“I owe you an apology, Major.”

“Oh? How’s that?”

“Earlier on, when I told you I’d read the Beketovka File, that was a lie. I hadn’t read it at all. But I’ve read it now.”

“I see,” said Reichleitner. He looked a little uncertain of where this conversation was now headed. I wasn’t sure myself. I refilled his glass. This time he sniffed it carefully, several times, before emptying the spirits down his throat.

I produced the Beketovka File from my briefcase and laid it on the table next to the bottle of Korn.

“My father is a German Jew,” I told him. “Born in Berlin, but brought up and educated in the United States. My mother comes from an old German family. Her father was the Baron von Dorff, who also went to live in the United States, to seek his fortune. Or at least to make another. He left behind a sister and two brothers. One of them had a son, my mother’s cousin. Friedrich von Dorff. We all spent one Christmas together in Berlin. Many years ago.

“When the war started, Friedrich’s son, Helmut, joined the cavalry. The Sixth Panzer Army, Sixteenth Division. With General Hube. The battering ram of the Panzer Corps. In August 1942 they crossed the Don, heading for Stalingrad. I thought he had been killed there. Until this afternoon, that is, when I read Heinrich Zahler’s account of life in Camp Number 108, at Beketovka. If you can call it life.”

I picked up the relevant page and read from it aloud.

“Your mother’s cousin’s son,” said Reichleitner.

I nodded. “I know a second cousin doesn’t sound like very much of a reason to be affected. But we were a close family. And I remember Helmut von Dorff extremely well. He was just a boy when I knew him. Not more than ten or twelve years old, I suppose. A beautiful boy. Gentle, well read, thoughtful, interested in philosophy.” I shrugged. “As I said, I had thought he was dead already. So it seems strange to read about him now. And horrible, of course, to learn the mean and degrading circumstances of his death.”

“Then we are enemies no more,” said Reichleitner.

He took the bottle by the neck and filled our glasses himself. We toasted each other again.

“I just wanted you to know. So that you can be sure I will do everything I can to make sure that the president reads this.”

“Thank you,” said Reichleitner. He smiled sadly. “This is good stuff. Where did you get it?”

“Shepheard’s Hotel.”

“Ah, Shepheard’s. I wish I were there now.”

“After the war perhaps you will be.”

“You know, I was thinking. I never saw Hitler. Not close up, anyway. But in Teheran, you’ll probably get to see Stalin. Up close. As close as I am now, perhaps.”

“Perhaps.”

“I envy you that opportunity. A chance to look him in the eye and see what kind of man he is. If he’s the monster I imagine him to be.”

“Do you think he is a monster?”

“I tell you honestly,” said Major Reichleitner. “I think I’m more afraid that he might seem just like you or me. An ordinary man.”

I left Major Reichleitner with the bottle and the cigarettes to continue working on the ciphers.

Outside Grey Pillars, I found myself feeling light-headed. Light-headed but heavy of spirit. Diana Vandervelden seemed almost as far away from me as Beketovka. Which was a pity, as the battery inside my chest was needing the kind of boost that only the company of a good friend could provide. A good female friend who still cared for me a little, perhaps. So I bought some flowers and walked round to Elena’s house. We had arranged to meet that evening.

Elena’s butler, Hossein, asked me to wait in the drawing room until his mistress was awake, explaining she always slept for a couple of hours in the afternoon. But I had the distinct impression that she was not alone. There was a certain masculine smell in the air. A smell like American cigarettes, Old Spice, and brilliantine. On the sofa was the October edition of Jumbo Comics, featuring Sheena Queen of the Jungle, which hadn’t been there the previous evening. I flicked through the comic book while I waited. Sheena had large breasts and wore a fetching sort of loincloth made from leopard skin. For killing panthers and riding elephants, Sheena’s outfit looked like a good choice. But you needed something different when your prey had just two legs. Elena knew that. And when, eventually, she came into the drawing room, she was dressed in something much more practical. She was wearing a white silk dressing gown underneath which she was practically naked. Which was fine if she really had been sleeping. A lot of people sleep naked. A few of them even do it alone. Not that she felt any pressing need to explain herself.

“What a nice surprise,” she said.

“I’m a bit early,” I said. “But I was in the area. So, I thought I’d drop by.” I brandished the magazine as evidence. “I hope I’m not interrupting something.”

She took the magazine from my hand, glanced at it, and then tossed it aside. “One of the boys from last night must have left it.”

“That’s what I thought.”

We sat down on the sofa. Elena crossed her legs, affording me a fine curving view of her upper thigh.

“Light me a cigarette, will you, darling?”

I lit us each one and concentrated on the little matching silk slipper that was holding on to the end of her perfect toes.

“I called your hotel this morning, but they said you’d already gone out.”

“Oh?”

“Yes. I wanted to see that you were all right. Last night, just after you’d left, I went up to bed and as I was drawing the curtains in my room, I saw a car parked on the corner. And a man standing beside it.”

“What kind of car?” I asked.

“Dark green. Alfa Romeo sports sedan.”

“Uh-huh.”

“I had the strange idea that the driver was Wlazyslaw Pulnarowicz. I mean, it looked very much like the colonel. Except for the fact that he wasn’t wearing his uniform. And he owns a white BMW.”

“I see. What was he wearing? This man you saw.”

Elena shrugged and played with her cigarette.

“The light wasn’t good. But I think he was wearing a light brown suit and spat shoes. You know, white, with a dark toe.”

“How about a hat?”

She shrugged. “Yes. A Panama. He was holding it in his hands.”

I thought for a moment about the man who had shot at me. “When you first talked about the colonel, you said he was the old-fashioned type and that he might get jealous and challenge me to a duel.”

Elena nodded.

“Do you think he’s the type that could murder a man in cold blood?”

“Oh, darling, they all are. That’s what the SOE is all about.”

“Someone took a shot at me last night. In Ezbekiah Gardens. He missed me, but another man, an Egyptian, was killed, Elena.”

“Oh my God, you don’t think it was Lazlo?”

“It looks that way. The only people running around Cairo carrying pistols with silencers work for SOE, or the German Abwehr.” I shrugged. It wasn’t anything like the ball I had pitched Harry Hopkins, but I still liked a German spy ring for the murders of Ted and Debbie Schmidt. I would have to speak to Colonel Powell about Wlazyslaw Pulnarowicz. “It might be that after the party, the colonel drove back home, changed out of his uniform, borrowed someone’s car, and then came back to see if I was still here. Then he followed me back to my hotel, where he tried to give my brain some air-conditioning.”

This time Elena took a proper hit on her cigarette. “I’m so sorry,” she said.

“Don’t be. You’re Desdemona in this play. Not Othello.”

“All the same, it was me who put you in harm’s way, Willy. It was me who made him jealous.” She shook her head. “God damn the man. It’s not like there was even anything to feel jealous about. We were just two old friends, catching up.”

“Maybe that was true last night,” I said and then kissed her on the lips. “But not now.”

She smiled and kissed me back. “No, you’re right. Now he would have every reason to feel jealous.”

“He’s not hiding upstairs, is he?”

“No. Would you like to check?”

“I think I should, don’t you?”

Elena stood up and, taking me by the hand, led me out of the drawing room toward the stairs.

“Of course you know what this means, don’t you?” I said. “It means you’re going to have to show me your bedroom wallpaper.”

“I hope you like it.”

“I’m sure I will.”

She led me into a hallway as big as a railway station, up the huge yellow marble stairs, into her bedroom, and closed the doors behind us. I glanced around. I didn’t see her wallpaper. I didn’t see the rug beneath my feet. I didn’t even see her bed. All I saw was Elena and the white silk gown slipping off her shoulders and the reflection of my own hands cupping her bare behind in a full-length cheval mirror.

I lay still next to the refuge afforded by Elena’s naked body. I thought of Heinrich Zahler and Helmut von Dorff lying in the cold ground of Beketovka. I thought of the insane Polish colonel who wanted to kill me, and the ruthless Nazi agent on the ship, and the imprisoned German major who was working to decode some signals that might reveal me to have been a Russian spy. I thought of poor Ted Schmidt’s body, or what remained of it, somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. I thought of Diana lying on the floor of her Chevy Chase house and her nameless lover’s bare backside framed between her knees. I thought of Mrs. Schmidt lying in the cold drawer of a Metro Police morgue. I thought of the president. I thought of Harry Hopkins and Winston Churchill and Josef Stalin. I even thought of Wild Bill Donovan and Colonel Powell. But mostly I thought of Elena. The shadows moved across the bedside cabinet and I thought of death. I thought of my own death, and assured myself that it seemed a long way off when I was with Elena.

For a while I slept and dreamed of Elena. When I did wake, she was in the bathroom, singing quietly. I sat up, switched on the bedside light, lit a cigarette, and looked around for something to read. On a large chest of drawers were several leather-bound photograph albums, and thinking that these might contain some pictures of our old times together in Berlin, I opened one and started turning the pages. Mostly the album was full of pictures of Elena in various Cairo nightclubs with her late husband, Freddy, and, once or twice, with King Farouk himself. But it was a page of photographs taken in the roof garden at the Auberge des Pyramides (Elena captioned all of her pictures in a neat, penciled hand) that, for the second time that day, left me feeling as if a camel had kicked me in the stomach.

In the photographs, Elena was seated beside a handsome man in a cream linen suit. He had his arm around her and she looked to be on the most intimate terms with him. What was surprising was that this was a man currently occupying a cell at Grey Pillars, less than half a mile away. The man in the photograph was Major Max Reichleitner.

I told myself these pictures could hardly have been taken before the war. Hadn’t Coogan told me that the Auberge des Pyramides had opened just a few months before? Hearing Elena coming out of the bathroom, I quickly put aside the album and retrieved my hardly smoked cigarette from its ashtray.

“Light me one, will you, darling?” she said. She was wearing nothing but a gold watch.

“Here, you can have this one,” I said, moving to her side.

I watched her closely as she took a puff, then put it out. Unpinning her blond hair, which was long enough to come past her waist, she began to brush it absently. Thinking that I was looking at her with desire, she smiled and said, “Do you want to have me again? Is that it?”

She climbed onto the bed and held her arms open expectantly. Taking a deep breath, I knelt over her but I could not help but consider the possibility that she herself was working for the Germans. Given the intimacy in the photograph of her with Reichleitner, was it at all possible that he would have come to Cairo and not tried to see her? Elena simply had to be his contact. After all, she wouldn’t know that Reichleitner had been captured by the Allies.

I put myself inside her, drawing a long, shuddering gasp from her.

Only now did the speed with which she had gone to bed with me again seem at all suspicious. I began to thrust hard, almost as if I were trying to punish her for the duplicity I now strongly suspected. Elena came with equal force, and for a moment I abandoned myself to pleasure. Then she snuggled into my side, and my doubts returned. Was it possible that she was more than just a contact?

But if she was a German spy, when had she been recruited? Casting my mind back to Berlin in the summer of 1938, I tried to recall the Elena Pontiatowska with whom I’d been intimate.

Elena had hated the Bolsheviks, that much was easy to remember. I recalled one particular conversation we had had when news of Stalin’s Ukrainian terror began to reach the West. Elena, whose father had fought in the Russo-Polish war of 1920, had insisted that the whole edifice of Soviet communism was based on mass murder, but Stalin was no worse than Lenin in that respect.

“My father always said that Lenin ordered the extermination of the entire Don Cossack people-a million men, women, and children,” she had told me. “It’s not that I like the Nazis. I don’t, as it happens. It’s just that I fear the Russians more. I know that however stupid and cruel the Nazis can be, the Russians are far worse. If Hitler wants the Sudetenland, it’s because he thinks he needs it as a bulwark against another Russian invasion. Perhaps the Czechs have forgotten what Trotsky did to them, in 1918, when he tried to turn their army into slave-labor battalions. Mark my words, Willy, they wouldn’t hesitate to do the same thing again. The Nazis are a bad lot, but the Bolsheviks are evil. That’s why Hitler got elected in the first place. Because people were terrified that the Reds might gain control in Germany. So you won’t convince me that there is anything good to be said about communism. Perhaps it sounds good in principle, as an ideal. But my family has seen it in practice, and it’s nothing short of bestial.”

Disliking the Russians was one thing; spying for the Nazis was another. There was only one thing for it. In order to be sure, one way or the other, I was going to have to search Elena’s house. If there were photographs of Major Reichleitner in an album, then there might easily be other evidence that would prove one way or the other if Elena were working for the Abwehr.

Elena roused herself, gave me a brief kiss, and returned to the bathroom.

I picked up the photo album. I wanted to see what she would say when she found me looking at it. At the pictures of her with Reichleitner. It would be instructive to see exactly how she tried to explain them. But when she emerged from the bathroom, she didn’t bat an eye.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I couldn’t resist having a peek. I suppose I thought there might be one or two pictures of you and me, back in Berlin.”

“They’re in another album,” she said coolly, her only concern seeming to be that we dress and find some dinner. “I’ll show you later. It’s time you got ready. I thought we could go to the club. But you’ll need to change. We can stop at your hotel on the way.”

“Who’s the man in the white suit?” I asked, putting aside the album and going into the bathroom.

“Don’t tell me you’re jealous,” she said, pulling on her underwear.

“Of course I’m jealous. You’re the best thing that’s happened to me since this war started. And now I see I have yet another rival.”

“Take my word for it, he’s no threat to you.”

“I don’t know. You and he seem pretty close in those pictures. Good-looking fellow, too.”

“Max? Yes, I suppose so.” Elena shrugged and, sitting down on the edge of the bed, began to roll on a pair of stockings. “For a while we were, you know. Close, like you say. But it didn’t last long. He was a Polish officer from Sikorski’s staff. From Posen. A rare bird.”

“Oh? How do you mean?”

“A German-speaking Pole who fought for the Polish army. That’s how rare.”

“And where is he now?”

“I’m not sure. I haven’t seen him in several months. Since the summer, I think. Max did a lot of work for SOE. In Yugoslavia. At least that’s what he told me.”

I nodded, thinking that these were good answers-they had the merit of being possibly true.

Elena finished fastening her stocking to its garter and, opening her closet, stared at an armory of devastating gowns. She pulled one out and put it on. Then she looked at her watch again. “Hurry up,” she said.