Hitler's peace

SUNDAY, OCTOBER 31-

MONDAY, NOVEMBER 1, 1943,

WASHINGTON, D.C.

Thornton Cole disliked homosexuals. Not loudly. He just disliked them for what he imagined were moral reasons and, when homosexuals worked for the government, for security reasons, too. He thought they might be blackmailed. Cole headed up the German desk at the State Department and had admired Sumner Welles as a farsighted internationalist, much to be preferred to the elderly and unimaginative Cordell Hull. But now, following the resignation of the assistant secretary of state and the rumors about Welles’s homosexuality, Cole had felt obliged to revise his good opinion of Welles-the more so when, upon recalling his own meetings with the man, he fancied that he might once have been the object of a pass.

Like Welles, Thornton Cole had been a Grottie-a graduate of Groton. Another well-connected Grottie, Willard Mayer, had introduced Cole to Welles, and after that, at Welles’s instigation, the two men had met a couple of times at Washington’s Metropolitan Club. Cole had been flattered by the older man’s attention, and even what now looked to be a clumsy pass had not set off alarm bells. It had happened a few years back, also at the Metropolitan. Welles had had too much to drink and in the course of the evening had compared Cole’s profile to that of Michelangelo’s David, adding, “Of course I can’t answer how your body compares, but your head is certainly as handsome as David’s.” Sumner Welles was married, with children, and Thornton Cole had been of the opinion that the assistant secretary of state’s words were merely maladroit and certainly not evidence of any sexual attraction. Now, of course, the remark looked very different. This realization upset Thornton Cole quite disproportionately, and, reasoning that Welles was hardly likely to be the only homosexual in the State Department, he had written down the names of the other men he suspected of being secretly queer: Lawrence Duggins (Welles’s former deputy), Alger Hiss, who was assistant to Stanley Hornbech, the State Department’s political adviser in charge of Far Eastern affairs, and David Melon, who worked for Cole on the German desk. Cole resolved to keep tabs on each of them. He focused first on his own deputy, and the nascent idea that he might uncover a whole nest of fags in State began to take hold of his imagination when he discovered that Melon was friendly with a man named Lovell White. Cole added White’s name to his list when he found that the two men occasionally spent the night together at White’s elegant Georgetown home. White, a flamboyant dresser and Washington wit, was a member of the American Ordnance Association, a pro-defense lobby with close ties to the War Department. Friendly with several senators and congressmen, White frequently invited the great and the good to his house in Acapulco and seemed to know everyone in government. The question was, how many of them were homosexuals, too? Thornton Cole made it his mission to find out.

It was usually only on weekends that Cole found the time to indulge his peculiar hobby. Unmarried, but conducting an affair with another man’s wife, he was used to loitering in dark doorways and watching someone’s house from a parked car. This particular Sunday, an unseasonably warm night and hardly like any Halloween he could recall, Cole followed Lovell White to the Hamilton Hotel, which overlooked Franklin Park, a notorious meeting place for homosexuals.

In the bar of the hotel, Cole had spied Lovell White deep in conversation with a man whose face, if not his name, Cole remembered as someone he had once or twice seen around Henry Stimson, the secretary of war. Another potential homosexual in the War Department was better than he had expected, and, debating how next to proceed-should he contact Hoover at the FBI?-Thornton Cole wandered into the park itself, to contemplate his next move.

But while Lovell White’s liaison was illicit, it was not illicit in a homosexual way. Lovell White was indeed a homosexual, but the man with him was no invert but Brutus. White, an experienced agent, had already noticed that he was being followed and had detailed Agent Diego, whose real name was Anastasio Pereira, the Abwehr’s South American agent, to watch his back. Pereira had seen Thornton Cole follow White from the spy’s home in Georgetown and, realizing that the identity of Brutus might now be compromised, he tailed Cole into Franklin Park and approached him, asking for a light.

Despite his Hooverish interest in uncovering homosexuals in government, Cole was quite unaware of the park’s reputation and regarded Pereira’s approach without alarm.

“It’s a fine evening,” Pereira observed, catching up with Cole. “At least it would be if I didn’t think my wife was in that hotel with another man.”

“I’m sorry to hear that.”

“Not as sorry as they’re going to be when I surprise them.”

Cole smiled thinly. “And what are you going to do?”

“Kill them both.”

“You’re joking.”