Hitler's peace

“Professor Willard Mayer?”

“Look,” I said, “if you’ve come to ask me more questions about Karl Frank and the Popular Front, I’m afraid there’s nothing more I can add to what you Feds already know.”

One of the men shook his head and took out some ID in his leatherlike sixteen-ounce paw. As I leaned in to take a squint at it, I caught the rank smell of sweat on his frayed shirt and the liquor on his breath. He was too grimy for FBI, I realized. Too grimy and all too human. He had a face ingrained with disbelief and a belly like the heavy bag at Stillman’s. I could have hit him all day and he’d still have been blowing smoke rings from the cheap cigar in the corner of his mouth.

“We’re not Feds,” he said. “We’re from the Metro Police Department, First Precinct on Fourth Street. I’m Lieutenant Flaherty and this is Sergeant Crooks. We’re here to ask you about Thornton Cole.”

“Thornton Cole? Last time I looked he was working for the State Department.”

“Last time?” said Flaherty. “When was that?”

“A month ago. Maybe longer.”

“What did he do there?” asked Crooks. The sergeant was smaller than his lieutenant, but not much. His green eyes were quicker, perhaps more skeptical, too, and when they narrowed I felt their shoemaker’s awl effect on the front of my head.

“He worked at the German desk. Analyzing German newspapers, propaganda, intelligence-anything that might aid our understanding of what the Germans are thinking. Basically the same thing I do here.”

“Is that how you come to know him well?”

“I wouldn’t say we know each other all that well. We don’t send each other a card at Christmas, if that’s what you mean. Look, Lieutenant, what’s this about?”

Flaherty pressed his belly hard as if he might have an ulcer. It wasn’t enough to gain my sympathy.

“Any idea what Cole gets up to in his private life?”

“ ‘Gets up to’? No, I have no idea. For all I know he has a hammock above his desk and a private life that’s built around a stamp collection. As I said, our acquaintance is limited to work. Now and then I’ll send something his way, and now and then he’ll send something to me. Usually it arrives in a nice big brown envelope with the words ‘Top Secret’ printed on the corner, just so that I know not to leave it on the bus. It’s that and the occasional hello at the Metropolitan Club.”

“What kind of ‘something’ did you send each other?”

I smiled a patient sort of smile, but I was beginning to feel like Flaherty’s ulcer. “Gentlemen. I’m sure you could beat it out of me in sixty seconds flat, but you must know that his work, like mine, is classified. I’d need the permission of my superiors to answer that question. Assuming you could find one of my superiors. It’s a little early for some of the white-shoe boys that run this place. I’d like to be of assistance. But right now you’re asking the wrong questions. If I knew what this was about, then I might be able to provide some answers you could exercise your pencils on.”

“Thornton Cole was found dead early this morning,” said Lieutenant Flaherty. “In Franklin Park. He’d been murdered. Stabbed once through the heart.”

Funny thing: whereas I merely felt that I had been stabbed through the heart, Thornton Cole really had been. The poor bastard. I tried to convince myself that I almost envied him, but it didn’t work. Diana had been right about that much, anyway. I did love myself-at least enough not to want to be dead on her account.

“Frankly, the case looks open-and-shut,” said Crooks. “But we have to go through the motions. I mean the guy had been robbed, and-”

“We went to his house,” said Flaherty, interrupting Crooks quickly. “On Seventeenth Street? We found your name in his address book.”

“Oh, right.” I lit a cigarette. “So what did you do, open it at random? The address book. What happened to A through L?”

“We divided it up into four sections,” said Flaherty.

“Fair enough. But surely the people at State would have a better idea of what he was up to than me.”

“The thing is, nearly all his superiors are in Moscow,” said Crooks. “With Cordell Hull. The secretary of state is attending some kind of conference there with the British and the Chinese.”

I shrugged. “I rather doubt his murder could be related to anything he was working on. I mean, his work was secret, but it wasn’t at all hazardous. I don’t think.”

The two detectives nodded. “That’s what we thought,” said Crooks.

“We just came from H Street,” said Flaherty. “Someone at the Metropolitan Club said you once introduced Cole to Sumner Welles. Is that right?”

“That was quite a while ago. And I fail to see the relevance.”

Flaherty took off his hat and rubbed his head. “It’s probably not relevant at all. We’re just trying to build a picture of the kind of society in which the late Mr. Cole moved. What sort of a man was he?”

I shrugged. “Intelligent. Good German speaker. Hardworking.”

“Any idea why he wasn’t married?”

“No. But I don’t see what that could tell you. I’m not married, either,” I replied. Nor likely to be, I told myself.