Hitler's peace

“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.