Hitler's peace

“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.”