Hitler's peace

“And you’re on the Russian desk at State. Ted Schmidt.”

Schmidt was a pudgy man with dark curly hair, thick horn-rimmed glasses, and eyebrows to match. I had known him briefly at Harvard and recalled a slightly thinner man with a good sense of humor and a taste for expensive wine. He was smiling, only the smile didn’t sit right beside the sadness in his twitching, bloodshot eyes, the patches of stubble he’d missed with his Rolls, and the liquor on his breath. Two o’clock in the afternoon was a little early to be hitting the cabin bottle, even for a star-crossed lover like me. He was wearing a pair of corduroy trousers, a thick checked shirt, and a pair of English brogue shoes. In his hand was an unlit nickel cigar. Apart from what he was wearing, he looked and sounded like almost anybody you might see at State. He sounded like a character in a novel by Edith Wharton.

“Welcome to second class. I suspect there are better cabins than this one. And I know there are worse ones.” Schmidt picked up Donovan’s blue leather suitcase and brought it into the wardroom. “Nice luggage. Did you steal it?” Seeing me frown, he pointed to the initials WJD.

“It belongs to General Donovan. I’m taking it to Cairo for him.” I threw my own case onto the bed and closed the door.

“There’s another guy from State, fellow named Weitz, John Weitz, who’s somewhere ahead of the chimney stack. By the look of it, he’s sleeping in a closet. There’s just me and him, from State. We’re along to translate what the Rooskies are saying. Not that I think we’ll even get near the table. Harriman’s flying into Cairo from Moscow with his own guy. Fellow named Bohlen. So Weitz and I are on the bench, I think. Until Bohlen breaks his neck or fumbles the ball. The State Department’s in pretty bad odor right now.”

“So I hear.”

“And you? What’s your function on this little mystery tour?”

“Liaison officer from General Donovan to the president.”

“Sounds suitably vague. Not that anyone’s saying very much at all. Even the crew don’t know where we’re going. They know it’s somewhere important. And that some VIPs are coming aboard. Did that sailor give you the crap about the effectiveness of our armor?”

“As a matter of fact he did. I imagine the purser on the Titanic gave his passengers the same spiel.”

“You better believe it.” Schmidt laughed scornfully and lit the cigar. It stunk up the room as if he’d put a match to a skunk. “I haven’t met a sailor yet who understands the principle guiding the Iowa ’s immune zone. Put simply, our armor is compromised by the effective range of our guns. We have to get in closer to a target to use them, and the closer we get, the more likely it is that a shell will cause some real damage.

“Then there are the torpedoes. German torpedoes, that is, not ours. The kraut fish are more powerful than the Iowa ’s designers allowed for. Oh, I’m not saying we’re at risk or anything. But a direct hit is a direct hit, and no amount of armor is going to stop the effect of that. So the next time you hear some guy blowing off about the impregnability of this ship, ask him why the crews manning those gun turrets carry derringers in their boots.”

“Why do they carry derringers in their boots?” I asked. I didn’t imagine it was because they played a lot of poker.

“Take a look inside one of those turrets and you’ll understand. It takes quite a while to get out of one. They probably figure that it would be better to shoot themselves than be drowned like rats.”

“I can understand that.”

“Me, I have a real fear of drowning,” admitted Schmidt. “I can’t even swim, and I don’t mind admitting that this voyage fills me with a sense of foreboding. My brother was a sailor. He was drowned on the Yorktown, at the Battle of Midway.” Schmidt smiled nervously. “I guess that’s why the subject preoccupies me so much.”

“You won’t drown,” I said, and showed Schmidt one of the two automatics I was carrying. “If necessary, I’ll shoot you myself.”

“That’s very American of you.”

“Don’t mention it. It’s the least I can do for a Harvard man.”

Schmidt opened a small locker by his bed. “I’d say that calls for a drink, wouldn’t you?” He produced a bottle of Mount Vernon rye and poured two glasses. Handing one to me, he said, “Here’s to not drowning and not getting blown up by a torpedo.”

I raised my glass. “And to the Big Three.”

I really don’t remember much more about the rest of that day except that Schmidt and I got as stiff as a couple of cigar-store Indians. That made me feel a lot better about what I’d seen on Diana’s rug the night before, which is to say, I stopped feeling very much at all. Schmidt probably drank about twice as much as I did. For one thing it was his liquor we were drinking. For another, I figured he’d had a lot more practice. He put the stuff down his throat with no more thought than if it had come straight out of a cow.