Hitler's peace

I sat down at my desk and let my heart run around the room naked for a while so I could describe how this looked as accurately as possible. Then I picked up my best pen and started to write. Probably I played up the secrecy and danger of the mission ahead of me more than I should have, but the part about how stupid I thought I had been and how much I cared for Diana read accurately enough. I wondered that I hadn’t thought of writing to her before. I might even have used the word “love” once or twice. More if you counted the corny little poem I started, finished, and then tossed in the wastepaper basket.

I laid my letter to Diana on the hall table with a note to Michael asking him to post it first thing in the morning. Ten minutes later I crumpled up the note and tossed it in the wastepaper basket alongside my crummy attempt at a love poem. I had decided that I would post the letter myself on my way to Hampton Roads the next day. Finally, I tossed the letter on the front seat of my car and drove up to Chevy Chase, intending to put it in her mailbox so that she might read it over breakfast and realize the justice of giving me a second chance.

It was raining by the time I got to the little town of Chevy Chase and the 1920s-vintage colonial where Diana lived. By now I had convinced myself to forget about the letter. If her car was there I was going to ring her doorbell, throw myself on her mercy and my knees, and ask Diana to marry me. In a church, if she wanted. With witnesses present to make sure we both meant it.

I parked on the street and, ignoring the rain, walked toward the verandah, trying not to make a mountain out of the molehillshaped Nash coupe that was in the driveway behind Diana’s ruby red Packard Eight. A dim light burned behind the plush velvet curtains in her drawing room window, and as I approached the house I could hear the sound of music. It was easy, unhurried music. The sort of music you like to have in a seraglio when you don’t want to listen to anything except someone else breathing softly in your ear.

I stood on the verandah and, forcing myself to play the Peeping Tom, looked in through a fissure in the curtains. Neither of the two people lying on the rug in front of the fire saw me. They were too busy doing what two people do when they have decided to see just how far they can throw their clothes across the room. Doing what I’d done myself on that same rug just a few weeks before. And the way they were doing it, it looked as if it was going to be a while before Diana was free to listen to my proposal of marriage.

Suddenly I seemed ridiculous to myself. Especially the notion about asking her to marry me. It was quite obvious to me that the very idea of marrying me couldn’t have been further from her mind. With no other idea in my head I returned to my car and, for quite a while, just sat there trying but failing to detach my mind from what was happening on that rug. Half of me hoped that the man would come out so that I could get a better look at him. I even constructed a little scene that had me facing them both down, but the more I thought about that, the uglier it seemed. And as the dawn came up I took the envelope, placed it in her mailbox, and drove quietly away.

XIII

FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 12-

SUNDAY, NOVEMBER 14, 1943,

POINT LOOKOUT

I had missed the boat. Leaning on the hood of my car, I smoked a cigarette and looked out at the waters off the southernmost point of Maryland’s Western Shore where the USS Iowa was now no more than a trail of smoke on the burnished horizon. It was hardly my fault; the Iowa had sailed early. Or so the pierman had told me.

I was still pondering my next move when a couple of black Hudsons rolled up and discharged four tough-looking men with nervous eyes and tight lips. They were wearing dark suits, hats, and ties that matched their less than sunny dispositions.

I threw aside my cigarette and straightened up. So this was how the FBI arrested you. They got you to drive seventy miles out of Washington on a wild-goose chase and then, when you were waiting somewhere quiet, they picked you up without any fuss. True, I had a gun in my shoulder holster, but there was less chance of my using it to resist arrest than there was of my not being able to complete the crossword puzzle in the Post.

“Professor Mayer,” one of the men asked, with a voice that contained no inflection. He had a hard, neat, well-kept face, like the picket fence in front of the American Horticultural Society. He tried to put a smile in his blue eyes but it came off looking sarcastic.

“Yes,” I said, bracing myself. I almost held my wrists out in front of me.

“Could I see some identification, please, sir?” While he waited, he pulled his finger until the knuckle cracked.

I took out my wallet. I was sure they were about to inspect Donovan’s suitcase and inform me I had failed to notice something concealed in the wrapping of the parcel that would prove I had opened it.