Hitler's peace

I checked the bar. I checked the Long Bar. I checked the dining room. I even checked the men’s room off the lobby. But there was no sign of the man with the newspaper. I went outside and back down the steps. The man with the postcards saw me and backed away nervously. I smiled and apologized and handed him a fistful of the greaseproof paper he called money. He grinned back at me, with absolute forgiveness. I had made his evening. He had sold another stupid American some dirty postcards.

XX

TUESDAY, NOVEMBER 23, 1943,

CAIRO

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.