Hitler's peace

V

My journey from New York to London would have left Ulysses looking for a couple of aspirin. Eight hours after leaving LaGuardia Airport at 8:00 A.M. on Tuesday the fifth, I had only traveled as far as Botwood, Newfoundland, where the U.S. Navy Coronado flying boat stopped to refuel. At 5:30 P.M., the four-engine plane was back in the air and heading east across the Atlantic like an outsized goose flying the wrong way for winter.

There were three other passengers: a British general named Turner; Joel Beinart, a USAAF colonel from Albuquerque; and John Wooldridge, a naval commander from Delaware, all three of them tight-lipped men whose demeanor seemed to indicate it wasn’t just walls that had ears but the fuselage of a transatlantic aircraft as well. Not that I was feeling very gabby myself. For much of the journey, I read the Katyn files given to me by the president, which put the kibosh on any conversation.

The Wehrmacht file on Katyn had come via Allen Dulles from the OSS office in Berne. It was the most exhaustively detailed of the files, but I wondered how Dulles had come by it. In my mind’s eye I pictured some blond, blue-eyed Ubermensch from the German embassy in Bern just turning up at the OSS office one day and handing over the file as if it were nothing more important than the Swiss daily newspapers. Or had Dulles met up with his opposite number in the Abwehr for a glass of hot wine in the bar of the Hotel Schweizerhof? If either of these two scenarios were true, then it seemed to imply a degree of cooperation between Dulles and German intelligence that I found intriguing.

An astonishing number of photographs accompanied the findings of the so-called International Committee. Assembled by the Germans, it included the professor of pathology and anatomy at Zagreb University, Ljudevit Jurak, and several Allied officers who were German POWs. It was obvious that the Nazis hoped to exploit the massacre to drive a wedge between the Soviet Union and its Western allies. And, whatever happened, it was impossible to see how, after the war, the British or the Americans could ask the people of Poland to live in peace with the Russians. That possibility seemed no more likely than the chief rabbi of Poland asking Hitler and Himmler to come over for a Passover drink and a couple of hands of whist.

At Katyn there had been a systematic attempt by the Russians to liquidate the national leaders of Polish independence. And it was clear to me that Stalin, no less than Hitler, had wanted to reduce Poland to the level of a subject state within his empire. Just as important, however, he had wanted revenge on the Poles for the defeat they had inflicted on the Red Army and on its commander-Stalin himself-at the Battle of Lvov in July 1920.

I had witnessed the Russian hatred of the Poles at first hand and in circumstances that even now, more than five years later, I still found troubling. No, “troubling” didn’t really cover it; potentially dangerous was more like it. To have one skeleton in my OSS locker was a misfortune, but to have two looked like a serious predicament.

The Coronado gave a lurch as we hit some turbulence, and the naval commander groaned.

“Don’t worry about that,” said the USAAF colonel. “Try to think of an air pocket as something to catch the plane rather than to trip it up.”

“Would anyone care for a drink?” asked the British general. He was wearing breeches, tall riding boots with buckles, and a thick belted tunic that looked as if it had been tailored before the year

1900. A woolly-bear caterpillar clung tenaciously to his upper lip underneath a hooked nose. With fine, peaceful, well-manicured hands, the general threw open a large and well-provisioned hamper basket and took out a flat pint of bonded bourbon. A minute later the four of us were libating the benevolence of the gods of transatlantic air travel.

“Is this your first time in London?” asked the general, offering me a shoe-sized sandwich from a shoebox-sized tin.

“I was there before the war. At the time I was thinking of going up to Cambridge to do a doctorate in philosophy.”

“And did you? Go up to Cambridge?”

“No, I went to Vienna instead.”

The general’s Wellington-sized nose wrinkled with disbelief. “Vienna? Good God. What on earth possessed you to do that?”

I shrugged. “At the time it seemed like the place to be.” And added, “I also had some family there.”

After that the general regarded me somewhat as if I might be a Nazi spy. Or a relative of the Fuhrer perhaps. Hitler may have been the leader of Germany, but the general didn’t look as if he had forgotten Hitler had been born in Austria and had spent much of his young adult life knocking around Vienna. If I had said I had shared rooms at Wittenberg with Faustus he could not have regarded me with more suspicion, and we fell silent.

Arriving in Vienna at the age of just twenty-three, my Sheldon Travelling Fellowship supplemented by a very generous allowance from my mother’s even richer aunt, the Baroness von Bingen, not to mention the use of her very elegant apartment in the city’s exclusive Prinz Eugen Strasse, I had been almost immediately involved with the Vienna Circle-then the intellectual center of liberal European philosophy and notable for its opposition to the prevailing metaphysical and idealist trend of German philosophy. Which is just another way of saying that all of us were the self-annointed apostles of Einstein and relativity theory.

Moritz Schlick, my near neighbor in Vienna and the Vienna Circle’s leader, had invited me to join the group. The circle’s aim was to make philosophy more scientific, and while I had found it hard to feel much in common with them-several of the circle’s members were theoretical physicists, about as easy to talk to as men from Mars-it soon became clear that just to be involved with philosophy and the Vienna Circle was in itself a political act. The Nazis were set on the persecution of all those who didn’t agree with them, including the Vienna Circle, quite a few of whom were Jews. And after the election of the pro-Nazi Engelbert Dollfuss as chancellor of Austria, I decided to join the Communist Party. It was a party to which I belonged until the long, hot, and, for me, promiscuous summer of 1938.

By then I was living and lecturing in Berlin, where I was engaged in an affair with a Polish aristocrat, the Princess Elena Pontiatowska. She was a close friend of Christiane Lundgren, a UFA film studio actress who was herself sleeping with Josef Goebbels. Through Christiane I ended up meeting Goebbels socially on several occasions and, because of my Communist Party membership, of which neither Goebbels nor the princess was aware (nor, for that matter, did they know anything of my being half Jewish), it was not long before I found myself approached by the Russian People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs, the NKVD, and asked if I would spy on the German minister.

The idea of spying on the Nazis held considerable appeal. It was already clear there was going to be another European war. I told myself I would be doing my anti-Fascist bit in the way others had done during the Spanish Civil War. And so I agreed to report on any conversations I had with Goebbels. But after the Munich agreement in September of 1938, I became more actively involved. I agreed to accept an invitation to join the Abwehr, the military intelligence wing of the German army, with a view to supplying more detailed information to the NKVD.

In order to magnify my informal standing in the Abwehr, the NKVD provided me with some information that, at the time, I thought to be harmless. Later on, I discovered, to my horror, that the NKVD had used me to give the Nazis the names of three members of the Polish Secret Service. These three agents, one of them a woman just twenty-two years of age, were subsequently arrested, tortured by the Gestapo, tried by a German People’s Court, and guillotined at the notorious Plotzensee Prison in November 1938. Sickened at having been used by the Russians to rid themselves of people they regarded with no less hatred than they regarded the Germans, I severed my contacts with the NKVD, resigned my lectureship at Berlin University, and returned home to Harvard with my tail between my legs.

The plane lurched again and then seemed to wallow like a small ship in the trough of an invisible wave.

I now regarded my former membership in the German Communist Party as a youthful indiscretion. I told myself that if I was ever in Berlin or Vienna again it would be because the war was over, in which case what the OSS might think of my former political allegiances would hardly matter very much.

At last the plane landed at Shannon, where we stopped to refuel, stretch our legs, and say good-bye to the naval commander, who was to fly north to Larne in another plane to meet his new ship. The rest of us flew east to Stranraer, where I sent telegrams to some of the people I hoped to see before catching the train south to London. I even sent one to Diana back in Washington, informing her that I had arrived in Britain safely. And forty-five hours after leaving New York, I arrived at Claridge’s.

Though buttressed with heavy timbers and sandbags, all building windows crisscrossed with tape to cut down on flying glass, the West End of London still looked much as I remembered it. The bomb damage was confined to the East End and the docks. The Americans I saw on leave were nearly all Air Force, kids most of them, just as Roosevelt had said. Some didn’t look old enough to be served alcohol, let alone fly a B-24 on a bombing mission to Hamburg.

Although it was comparatively early when I checked into my hotel, I decided to go straight to bed and drank a glass of scotch to help me find oblivion. I was finally drifting off to sleep when I heard the air-raid siren. I put on my dressing gown and slippers and went down to the shelter, only to find that few of the other hotel guests had bothered to do the same. Returning to my room when the all-clear sounded, I had just closed my eyes again when there was another warning; this time, walking along the landing toward the emergency stairs, I met a small, piggy-looking man wearing evening dress, with red hair, round glasses, and a large cigar. He resembled a cherub thickened with alcohol and pinched with disappointment, and was quite unperturbed by the high-pitched purr-like a heavenly choir of dead cats-of the siren.

Noting my haste, the man chuckled and said, “ You must be an American. Word of advice, old boy. Don’t bother going to the shelter. It’s only a small air raid. Chances are that whatever bombs do get dropped will be somewhere east, along the Thames, and well away from the West End. Last month there were just five people killed by Jerry bombs in the whole of Great Britain.” The man puffed his cigar happily as if signaling that five dead was as trifling as a game of semi-billiards.

“Thank you, Mr…?”

“Waugh. Evelyn Waugh.”

Taking his advice, I went back to bed, downed another scotch, and, with no more disturbances, or at least none that I heard, finally slept for six hours.

When I awoke, I found that almost a dozen replies to the telegrams I had sent from Stranraer had been pushed under my door. Among all the telegrams from the diplomats and intelligence officers I hoped to see were a couple of messages from two old friends: Lord Victor Rothschild and the novelist Rosamond Lehmann, with whom I had been flirting for more than ten years. In an attempt to add some color to what was already known about Katyn, I faced a great many meetings with angry Poles and stuffy British civil servants, and so I was relying on Ros and Victor to help me enjoy myself. There was also a telegram from Diana. It read: IS IT POSSIBLE TO BE GLAD YOU’RE THERE, IF I’M NOT GLAD YOU’RE NOT HERE? DISCUSS. That was probably Diana’s idea of a philosophical question.

After a tepid English bath, a smallish English breakfast, and a thorough look through the London Times, I left the hotel, heading for Grosvenor Square. I spent the morning there meeting various people in the London station of the OSS. David Bruce, the station chief, was a forty-four-year-old multimillionaire who had the dubious distinction of being married to the daughter of Andrew Mellon, the U.S. steel magnate, one of the world’s richest men. Several of Bruce’s executive officers were no less rich, blue-blooded, or intellectually advantaged, including Russell D’Oench, the shipping heir, and Norman Pearson, a distinguished Yale professor of English. The London station of the OSS looked like an extension of Washington’s Metropolitan Club.

Pearson, in charge of the OSS London Bureau’s effort to counter German intelligence, was a published poet. Having sorted me out some ration coupons, he volunteered to squire me around London’s intelligence community. He was a year my junior, and a little on the thin side, made thinner by the food, or rather the lack of food available in the London shops. His suit, tailored in America, was now a couple of sizes too big for him.

Pearson was good company and hardly the kind of desperado most people would have expected in an intelligence job. But this was typical of our service. Even after three months’ instruction in security and espionage from the OSS training center at Catoctin Mountain, there were few of my colleagues-Ivy League lawyers and academics, like myself-who ever saw the need to behave like a military organization, or even a quasi-military one. The joke around Washington was that being an officer with the OSS was “a cellophane commission”: you could see through it, but it kept the draft off. And there was no getting away from the fact that for many of the younger officers, the OSS was a bit of an adventure and an escape from the rigors of ordinary military service. Quite a few officers were insubordinate as a matter of principle, and so-called orders were often put to a vote. And yet, through all of this, the OSS held together and did some useful work. Pearson was if anything more conscientious and soldierlike than most.

Pearson took me to the headquarters of the British Secret Intelligence Service, also known as MI6, the center of British counterintelligence. They were housed at 54 Broadway Buildings, a dingy structure of makeshift offices filled with staff in dowdy-looking civilian clothes.

Pearson introduced me to some of the section officers who had prepared much of the Katyn material used by Sir Owen O’Malley, the British ambassador to the Polish government in exile. It was Major King, the officer who had evaluated the original reports, who alerted me to the fact that whatever clarity existed with regard to Katyn was about to be muddied:

“The Soviet armies under General Sokolowski and General Jermienko recaptured Smolensk just two weeks ago, on September twenty-fifth,” he explained. “They retook the region of the Katyn Forest grave sites a few days later. So the exhumations the Germans had declared would take place in the autumn are now impossible. The chances are, of course, that the Russians will dig up the bodies again and produce their own report, blaming Jerry. But that’s not really my patch. You’d best speak to the chaps in Section Nine. Philby handles the interpretation of all the Russian intelligence we get.”

I smiled. “Kim Philby?”

“Yes. Do you know him?”

I nodded. “From before the war. When we were students, in Vienna. Where can I find him?”

“Seventh floor.”

Kim Philby looked more like a master in an English public school than an officer in the SIS. He wore an old tweed jacket with leather patches on the elbows, a pair of brown corduroy trousers held up by red suspenders, a flannel shirt, and a stained silk tie. Not very tall, he looked lean and even more undernourished than Pearson, and he smelled strongly of tobacco. It was almost ten years since I had seen him but he hadn’t changed very much. He still looked shifty and guarded. Seeing me standing next to his untidy desk, Philby stood, smiled uncertainly, and glanced at Pearson.

“My God, Willard Mayer. What on earth are you doing here?”

“Hello, Kim. I’m with the OSS.”

“You didn’t tell me you knew this chap, Norman.”

“We’ve only just met,” said Pearson.

“I’m here for a week,” I explained. “Then it’s back to Washington.”

“Sit down. Make yourselves at home. Catherine! Could you bring us all some tea, please?”

Still smiling uncertainly, Philby surveyed me steadily.

“The last time I saw you,” I said, “you were getting married. At the town hall in Vienna.”

“February 1934. My God, doesn’t time fly when you’re enjoying yourself.”

“How is Litzi?”

“Christ only knows. I haven’t seen her in a long time. We’re separated.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be. We never really got on. Can’t think why I married her. She was too wild, too bloody radical.”

“Perhaps we all were.”

“Maybe. Anyway, I have Aileen now. Two children. A girl and then a boy. And another on the way, for my sins. Are you married, Will?”

“Not so far.”

“Sensible fellow. You played the field, as I recall. And usually won. So what brings you up here to the homely comforts of Section Nine?”

“Because I hear you’re the Russian expert, Kim.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that.” Philby lit a cigarette and, tucking one hand underneath his armpit, smoked briskly. A ten-shilling note protruded from the none-too-clean handkerchief in his breast pocket. “But we have our moments of inspiration.”

The tea arrived. Philby glanced at his pocket watch, busied himself sorting out the chipped cups and saucers, and then, removing the lid, glanced inside the great brown enamelware pot, like the Mad Hatter looking for the dormouse. Twinkle, twinkle, little bat, I said to myself, how I wonder what you’re at.

“I’m investigating the Katyn Forest massacre,” I said. “For President Roosevelt. And I was wondering if you had any insight as to what might happen now that the Russians are in possession of that region again.”

Philby shrugged and poured the tea. “I expect the Supreme Council will appoint some sort of extraordinary state commission to investigate crimes committed by the German Fascist invaders, or some nonsense like that. To prove it was all a dastardly plot cooked up by the Jerries to disturb the harmonious unity of the Allies.” He picked a piece of tobacco off his lip. “Which is no more than our own foreign secretary, Mr. Eden, said in the House of Commons a while back.”

“Saying it is one thing. Believing it is quite another.”

“Well, you’d probably know more about that than me, old boy.” He stirred his tea thoughtfully, like a man mixing paint. “But let’s see, now. The Ivans will appoint a bunch of academicians and authors to the commission. Someone from the Smolensk Regional Executive. A People’s Commissar for this or that. Someone from the Russian Red Cross and Red Crescent Societies. Medical chap from the Red Army, probably. That kind of thing.”

I sipped the tea and found it too strong to be palatable. When they took away the pot, they’d probably use the dregs to paint a wooden fence. “Do you think the Soviets will invite anyone independent to join such a commission as you describe?”

“You put your finger right on it, Willard old boy. Independent. How is that independence to be guaranteed? The Germans have got their report. Roosevelt is going to have his. And now I expect the Russians will want theirs. I suppose people will have to make up their minds about what to believe. If you think in terms of global struggle, this kind of thing is inevitable. But whatever the rights and wrongs of the matter, the Russians are still our allies and we will have to learn to work with them if we are going to win this war.”

He seemed to have finished his analysis, and I stood up and thanked him for his time.

“Anything for our American cousins.”

Pearson added his thanks, and Philby said to me, “Norman is notable for being the least bewildered fellow in Grosvenor Square.” He’d brightened noticeably now that I’d said I was leaving. “We do our best not to be too dry or intimidating for you American chaps, but we cannot know how we seem. That we have survived unconquered thus far is because we have let nothing affect us. Not ration cards, not German bombs, no, not even the English weather-eh, Norman?”

Leaving Pearson at Broadway Buildings, I walked back across the park, pondering the renewal of my acquaintance with Kim Philby. I had known Harold “Kim” Philby for a brief period before the war. In late 1933, just down from Cambridge, Philby had arrived in Vienna on a motorcycle. Four years younger than me and the son of a famous British explorer, Philby had thrown himself into working for Vienna’s left-wing resistance, with little thought for his own safety. After nine Socialist leaders had been lynched by the Heimwehr, Austria’s right-wing, pro-Nazi militia, he and I had helped to hide wanted leftists until they could be smuggled out of the country to Czechoslovakia.

While Philby and I had remained in Vienna, Otto Deutsch, a Ph. D. working for the sexologist Wilhelm Reich, not to mention the NKVD, had made several attempts to recruit the two of us to the Russian Secret Service. It was an invitation I had resisted at the time. I didn’t know about Philby himself, who had returned to England with Litzi in May 1934, so that she might escape the clutches of the Heimwehr, for she had been more openly active than Kim. I had always assumed that, like myself, Philby had resisted Deutsch’s invitation to join the NKVD in Vienna. But seeing him again, working for the SIS in the Russian counterintelligence section and apparently nervous at the renewal of our acquaintance, made me wonder.

Of course I could say nothing about this without drawing attention to my own background. Not that I thought it really mattered very much. If the British were, as was generally supposed by the OSS, breaking the German codes and not passing on relevant information to the Russians for fear of being asked to share all decoded German material, then, doubtless, Philby would see it as his duty to remedy such perfidious behavior toward an ally. I might even have applauded such so-called treachery. I would not have done it myself, but I might almost have approved of it being done by someone else.

Back in my hotel room, I made some notes for my Katyn report, had another tepid bath, and put on a tuxedo. By six-thirty I was in the bar at the Ritz ordering a second martini even as I was finishing my first. Saying the right thing, saying a lot less than people wanted to know, saying not very much at all, just listening-it had been a long day, and I was desperate to relax. Rosamond was just the woman to pull out the pins.

I had not seen her since the war began, and I was a little surprised that her once brown wavy hair was now gray, with a blue rinse; and yet she had lost none of her voluptuous allure. She kissed and hugged me.

“Darling,” she cooed, in her soft, breathy voice. “How wonderful to see you.”

“You’re still as gorgeous as you always were.”

“It’s very sweet of you, Will, but I’m not.” She touched her hair self-consciously.

I judged her to be in her early forties by now, but more beautiful than ever. She always reminded me a little of Vivien Leigh, only more womanly and sensuous. Less impetuous and much more thoughtful. Tall, pale-skinned, with a magnificent figure that belonged on a chaise longue in some artist’s studio, she wore a long, silvery skirt and a purple chiffon blouse that outlined her full figure.

“I brought you some stockings,” I told her. “Gold Stripe. Only I’m afraid I left them in my room at Claridge’s.”

“On purpose, of course. To make sure I’d come back to your hotel.”

Ros was used to men throwing themselves at her feet, and she almost expected it as the price of being so beautiful, even as she did her best to play that down. This was an almost impossible task; most of the time, and wherever she was, Ros always stood out like a woman wearing a Balenciaga cocktail dress to a Sunday school picnic in Nebraska.

“Of course.” I grinned.

She fingered the string of pearls around her creamy white neck as I ordered a bottle of champagne.

I offered her a cigarette and she squeezed it into a little black holder.

“You’re living with a poet these days, is that right?” I leaned forward to light her cigarette and caught a whiff of some perfume that reached right down into my trouser pocket, and then some.

“That’s right,” she puffed. “He’s gone off to visit his wife and children.”

“Is he any good? As a poet, I mean?”

“Oh, yes. And terribly good-looking, too. Just like you, darling. Only I don’t want to talk about him, because I’m cross with him.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s gone off to visit his wife and children instead of staying here in London with me, of course.”

“Of course. But what happened to Wogan?”

Wogan Philipps, the Second Baron Milford, was the husband Ros had left to be with her poet.

“He’s getting married again. To a fellow Communist. At least he is as soon as I’ve divorced him.”

“I didn’t know Wogan was a Communist.”

“My dear, he’s positively riddled with it.”

“But you’re not a Communist, are you?”

“Lord, no. I am not and never have been a political animal. Romantically inclined toward the left, but not actively. And I expect men to make me their abiding cause, not Hitler or Stalin. Just as I have made men mine.”

“Then here’s to you, sweetheart,” I said. “You get my vote, every time.”

After a flirtatious dinner, we walked around the corner to St. James’s Place, where Victor Rothschild had a top-floor flat. A servant gave us a message that His Lordship had gone to a drinks party in Chesterfield Gardens and we should join him there.

“Shall we go?” I asked Rosamond.

“Why not? It beats going home to an empty flat in Kensington. And it’s been simply ages since I went to a party.”

Tomas Harris and his wife, Hilda, were a wealthy couple whose hospitality was exceeded only by their self-evident good taste. Harris was an art dealer, and many of the walls of the house in Chesterfield Gardens displayed paintings and drawings by the likes of El Greco and Goya.

“You must be Victor’s American,” he said, greeting me warmly. “And you must be Lady Milford. I’ve read all of your novels. Dusty Answer is one of my favorite books.”

“I’ve just finished reading Invitation to the Waltz, ” said Hilda Harris. “I was so excited when Tom told me you might be coming. Come on, let me introduce you to some people.” She took Rosamond by the elbow. “Do you know Guy Burgess?”

“Yes. Is he here?”

“Willard!”

A dark-haired and stocky but handsome man came over and greeted me, exuding an air that was part rabbinical, part tycoon, part Bolshevik, and part aristocrat. Victor Rothschild was a prophet crying in a wilderness of privilege and position. We shared a love of jazz and a mutually rosy view of science, which was easier for Victor, given that he was actually a scientist. Victor couldn’t have made himself more scientific if he’d slept on a Petri dish.

“Willard, good to see you,” he said, shaking my hand furiously. “Tell me, you didn’t bring your saxophone, did you? Will plays a pretty mean sax, Tom.”

“I didn’t think it was appropriate,” I said. “When you’re the president’s special envoy, traveling with a saxophone is a little like bringing your pool cue to an audience with the Pope.”

“President’s special envoy, eh? That is impressive.”

“I think it sounds more impressive than it is. And what about you, Victor? What are you up to?”

“MI5. I run a little antisabotage outfit, X-raying Winston’s cigars, that kind of thing. Technical stuff.” Rothschild wagged his finger at me. “Introduce him to someone, Tom. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

Watching Rothschild disappear out the drawing room door, Harris said, “He’s too modest by half. From what I hear he’s involved in bomb disposal. Tackling the latest German fuses and detonators. It’s dangerous work.” Glancing over my shoulder, Harris waved a tall, rather limp-looking man of the lean and hungry kind over toward us. “Tony, this is Willard Mayer. Willard, this is Anthony Blunt.”

The man who came over had hands that more properly belonged on a delicate girl and the sort of fastidious, well-bred mouth that looked as if he’d been weaned on lemons and limes. He had an odd way of speaking that I didn’t like.

“Oh, yes,” said Blunt, “Kim’s been telling me all about you. ” He pronounced the last word with an indecent amount of emphasis, as if affecting a kind of disapproval.

“Will?”

I turned to find Kim Philby standing behind me.

“Fancy that. I was just talking about you, Will.”

“Be my guest. I’m fully insured.”

“He’s a friend of Victor’s,” Harris told Philby, moving away to greet yet another guest.

“Listen,” said Philby, “thanks awfully for not dropping me in it this afternoon. For not mentioning exactly what we got up to in Vienna.”

“I couldn’t very well have done that. Not without dropping myself in it, too. Besides”-I flicked a match against my thumbnail and lit a cigarette-“Vienna was more than ten years ago. Things are different now. Russia is our ally, for a start.”

“True,” said Philby. “Although there are times when you wouldn’t think so, the way we run this war.”

“Speak for yourself. I’m not running anything except the length and breadth of the odd tennis court. Pretty much I do what I’m told.”

“What I meant was that sometimes, when you look at the Red Army’s casualties, it seems as if the Soviet Union is the only country fighting Germany. But for the existence of the eastern front, the very idea of the British and the Americans being able to mount a landing in Europe would seem preposterous.”

“I was speaking to some guy in my hotel who told me that there were just five people killed in Britain during the whole of September. Can that really be true? Or was he just trying to convince me that I could leave my umbrella at home?”

“Oh, yes,” said Philby, “that’s perfectly true. And meanwhile the Russians are dying at a rate of something like seventy thousand a month. I’ve seen intelligence reports that estimate total Russian casualties at over two million. So you can see why they’re so worried that we’ll negotiate a separate peace and they’ll end up fighting Hitler on their own. It’s a fear that will hardly be assuaged by the knowledge that your president is now scrutinizing those murders in the Katyn Forest.”

“I believe it’s still common practice for murder to be scrutinized,” I said. “It’s one of the things that helps to give us the illusion that we’re living in a civilized world.”

“Oh, surely. But Stalin could hardly be blamed if he suspects that the Western allies might use Katyn as an excuse to postpone an invasion of Europe, at least until the Wehrmacht and the Red Army have destroyed each other.”

“You seem to know a lot about what Stalin suspects, Kim.”

Philby shook his head. “Intelligent guesswork. That’s what this lark is all about. Thing about the Russians is, they’re not hard to second-guess. Unlike Churchill. There’s no telling what’s going on in that man’s devious mind.”

“From what I gather, Churchill hasn’t paid much attention to Katyn. He doesn’t behave like a man who’s preparing to use it as an excuse to postpone a second front.”

“Perhaps not,” admitted Blunt. “But there are plenty of others who would, you know? The Jew-hating brigade who think we’re at war with the wrong enemy.” He grabbed a glass off a passing tray and swallowed the contents in one greedy parabola. “What about Roosevelt? Do you think he would countenance it?”

Blunt smiled warmly, but I still didn’t like his mouth.

Catching my frown, Philby said, “It’s all right, Willard. Anthony is one of us.”

“And what might that be?” I said, bristling. The proposition that Anthony Blunt was “one of us” seemed almost as offensive to me as its corollary, that I might be one of them.

“MI5. In fact, Anthony might be just the man you need to speak to about your Polish thing. The Allied governments in exile, neutral countries with diplomatic missions in London, Anthony keeps an eye on all of them, don’t you, Tony?”

“If you say so, Kim,” smiled Blunt.

“Well, it’s no great secret,” grumbled Philby.

“I can tell you this,” said Blunt. “The Poles would dearly like to get their hands on a Russian who’s an attache at the Soviet embassy in Washington. Fellow named Vasily Zubilin. In 1940 he was a major in the People’s Commissariat on Internal Affairs and commanded one of the execution battalions at Katyn. It seems that the Russians sent him to Washington as a reward for a good job. And to get him out of the neighborhood. And because they know he’s never likely to defect. If he did, they’d simply tell your government what he did at Katyn. And then some Pole would very likely want to have him charged as a war criminal. Whatever that is.

“So, how do you know Victor?” Blunt asked abruptly, changing the subject.

“We share a similarly perfunctory attitude to our Jewishness,” I said. “Or, in my case, and to be more accurate, my half-Jewishness. I went to his wedding to Barbara. And you?”

“Oh. Cambridge,” said Blunt. “And Rosamond. You came with her, didn’t you? How do you know Rosie?”

“Do stop interrogating him, Anthony,” said Philby.

“It’s all right,” I said, although I didn’t answer Blunt’s question and, hearing Rosamond’s distinctive laugh, I glanced around and saw her listening with much amusement as a disheveled figure held forth loudly about some boy he was trying to seduce. I was beginning to suspect that almost everyone invited to the party had been to Cambridge and was either a spy, a Communist, or a homosexual-in Anthony Blunt’s case very probably all three.

Rothschild came back into the room carrying a saxophone triumphantly aloft.

“Victor.” I laughed. “I think you’re very probably the only man I know who could track down a spare saxophone at eleven o’clock at night.” I took the sax from my old friend, who sat down at the piano, lit a cigarette, then lifted the lid.

We played for more than half an hour. Rothschild was the better musician, but it was late and people were too drunk to notice my technical shortcomings. After we had finished, Philby drew me aside.

“Very good,” he said. “Very good indeed. That was quite a duo.”

I shrugged and drank a glass of champagne to moisten my mouth.

“You remember Otto Deutsch, of course?” he said.

“Otto? Yes. What ever happened to him? He came to London, didn’t he? After Austria went Fascist.”

“He was on a ship that was sunk in the mid-Atlantic by a German submarine.” Philby paused and lit a cigarette.

“Poor Otto. I didn’t know.”

“He tried to recruit me, you know. To the NKVD, back in Vienna.”

“Really?”

“I couldn’t see the point, quite frankly. I think I would have worked for them if I’d stayed on in Austria. But for Litzi’s sake I had to leave. So I came back here, got a job on the Times. But I saw Otto again, in 1937, when he was on his way to Russia. I think he was rather lucky not to get shot in the Great Purge. Anyway, he tried to recruit me here in London, would you believe? God knows why. I mean, any information a journalist gets, he tends to pass on to his readers. I was a Communist, of course. Still am, if the truth be known, which, if it was, I’d be out of the service on my ear.”

“Why are you telling me this, Kim?”

“Because I think I can trust you, old boy. And what you were saying earlier. About the idea of our side in this war negotiating a peace with Jerry.”

I didn’t recall saying anything much about that, but I let it go.

“I think if I ever did find out something like that, then secrecy be damned. I’d march straight round to the Soviet embassy and shove a note through the bloody letterbox. Dear Comrade Stalin, The British and Americans are selling you down the Volga. Yours sincerely, Kim Philby, MI5.”

“I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

“No? Ever hear of a chap called George Earle?”

“Yes. As a matter of fact he’s one of the reasons I’m here. Earle’s the president’s special representative in the Balkans. He wrote an unsolicited report for FDR about the Katyn Forest massacre. He’s a pal of Roosevelt’s. Rich. Very rich. Like the rest of Roosevelt’s pals.”

“You included,” chuckled Philby.

“That’s my family you’re talking about, Kim. Not me.”

“Lord, now you sound just like Victor.” He laughed. “The epicurean ascetic.” Philby grabbed another glass of champagne.

I grabbed one myself and sipped it slowly this time. I wanted to cool down and stop myself from punching Philby. I excused him because he was drunk. And because I wanted to hear more about George Earle.

“Listen,” he said, with the air of someone who couldn’t make up his mind if he was offering up gossip or a state secret. It seemed quite possible that he didn’t know the difference. “The Earle family made its money in the sugar trade. Earle dropped out of Harvard, and in 1916 he joined General Pershing’s army, trying to hunt down Pancho Villa in Mexico. Then he joined the U.S. Navy and won the Navy Cross, which is how he’s so thick with Roosevelt. FDR’s a big navy man, right?”

I nodded. “Where are you going with this, Kim?”

Philby tapped the side of his nose. “You’ll see.” He lit another cigarette and then snatched it from his mouth impatiently.

“A lifelong Republican, Earle nevertheless supported Roosevelt for president in 1932. And as a reward, FDR made him his naval attache in Ankara. Now, then. Here comes the good part. Hefty-that’s our chum Earle’s nickname-has a girlfriend, a Belgian dancer and part-time prostitute named Helene, who works for us. I’m telling you all this so you’ll know where some of our information is coming from.

“In May of this year, Hefty met the German ambassador in Ankara. As I’m sure you are aware, the ambassador is also the former German chancellor, Franz von Papen. According to Helene, Hefty and von Papen conducted some secret peace negotiations. We’re not quite sure if the talks were initiated by Earle or by von Papen. Either way, Earle reported back to FDR and von Papen reported back to someone in Berlin-we’re not exactly sure to whom. Nothing much seemed to happen for a while. Then, just a few days ago, Earle had a meeting with an American by the name of Theodor Morde. Ever hear of him?”

“I’ve never heard of Theodor Morde,” I said, truthfully.

“Morde’s a chap who used to work for COI in Cairo before it turned into your mob, the OSS. I thought you might know him.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” I repeated.

“Morde’s an American who travels on a Portuguese passport. Works for the Reader’s Digest organization. The sort of fellow your mob could very easily deny. I’m sure you know the kind of thing. Anyway, this fellow Morde had a meeting with von Papen just two days ago. We’ve no idea what was said. Helene isn’t fucking him, unfortunately. But other sources seem to indicate that afterwards, Morde gave Earle some kind of document from von Papen for Roosevelt. And that, for now, is as much as we know.”

Throughout Philby’s discourse I felt my jaw tighten. Blunt’s information about Vasily Zubilin had been surprising enough, but this was much more disturbing, and the apparent insouciance with which Philby had delivered his bombshell, so typically English, only seemed to make matters worse.

“And did you go straight round to the Soviet embassy and shove a note through the letterbox? Like you said?”

“Not yet,” said Philby. “But I still might.”

“What stopped you?”

“You did, as a matter of fact.”

“Me?”

“Turning up in my office like that, out of the blue, after all these years. Not only that, but you turning out to be another of Roosevelt’s special representatives, just like old Hefty. And I thought to myself, Don’t do anything hasty, Kim. Perhaps old Willard can help you put some flesh on the story, if there is one. Stand it up, as we journalists say.”

My initial sense of caution had given way to intrigue. If Philby was right, and Roosevelt really was negotiating a separate peace, then what was the point of the Big Three?

“How?”

“Oh, I dunno. Keep your ears open on Campus and around the White House, that sort of thing. A watching brief, that’s all.”

“And suppose I do hear something. Then what?”

“There’s a pal of mine at the British embassy in Washington. Bit of an old lefty, like you and me. Name of Childs. Stephen Childs. A good solid chap but also inclined to the view that the Russians are being given the sharp end of the stick. If you did hear anything fishy, you might give him a call. Have a drink. Talk it over. Decide between yourselves what to do about it and simply act according to what your consciences dictate. As for me…” Philby shrugged. “I shall have to see what more can be discovered through our agents in Ankara. But frankly I am not optimistic, and we shall have to see where your man Morde turns up next.”

“I’m not promising anything,” I said. “But I’ll see what I can do. With Roosevelt. ‘I’ll observe his looks. I’ll tent him to the quick. If he but blench, I know my course.’ ”

Philby was looking puzzled.

“ Hamlet, ” I explained. “As a matter of fact, what did you read when you were up at Cambridge?”

Philby grinned. “Marx and Engels, of course.”