like to avoid this coming between myself and Stalin. Is that clearly understood?”
Clear enough. I was to be a mutt with no balls and just my master’s collar to let people know I had the right to piss on his flowers. But I fixed a smile to my face and, brushing some stars and stripes onto my words, piped, “Yes, sir, I understand you perfectly.”
When I got back home, Diana was waiting for me, full of excited questions.
“Well?” she said. “What happened?”
“He makes a terrible martini,” I said. “That’s what happened.”
“You had drinks with him?”
“Just the two of us. As if he was Nick and I was Nora Charles.”
“What was it like?”
“Too much gin. And way too cold. Like a country house party in England.”
“I meant, what did you talk about?”
“Among other things, philosophy.”
“Philosophy?” Diana pulled a face, and sat down. Already she was looking less excited. “That’s easier on the stomach than sleeping pills, I guess.”
Diana Vandervelden was rich, loud, glamorous, and drily funny in a way that always put me in mind of one of Hollywood’s tougher leading ladies, say Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn. Formidably intelligent, she was easily bored and had given up a place at Bryn Mawr to play women’s golf, almost winning the U.S. Women’s Amateur title in 1936. The year after that she had quit competition golf to marry a senator. “When I met my husband it was love at first sight,” she was fond of saying. “But that’s because I was too cheap to buy glasses.” Diana was herself not very political, preferring writers and artists to senators, and, despite her many accomplishments in the salon-she was an excellent cook and was famous for giving some of the best dinner parties in Washington-she had quickly tired of being married to her lawyer husband: “I was always cooking for his Republican friends,” she later complained to me. “Pearls before swine. And you needed the whole damn oyster farm.” When she left her husband in 1940, Diana had set up her own decorating business, which was how she and I had first met. Soon after I moved to Washington, a mutual friend had suggested I hire her to fix up my home in Kalorama Heights. “A philosopher’s house, huh? Let’s see, now. How would that look? How about a lot of mirrors, all at navel height?” Our friends expected us to get married, but Diana took a dim view of marriage. So did I.
Right from the beginning my relationship with Diana had been intensely sexual, which suited us both just fine. We were very fond of each other, but neither of us ever talked much about love. “We love each other,” I had told Diana the previous Christmas, “in the way people do when they love themselves just a little more.”
And I loved it that Diana hated philosophy. The last thing I was looking for was someone who wanted to talk about my subject. I liked women. Especially when they were as intelligent and witty as Diana. I just didn’t like it when they wanted to talk about logic. Philosophy can be a stimulating companion in the salon, but it’s a dreadful bore in the bedroom.
“What else did Roosevelt talk about?”
“War work. He wants me to write a report on something.”
“How very heroic,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “What do you get for that? A medal on a typewriter ribbon?”
I grinned, enjoying her show of scorn. Both Diana’s brothers had enlisted in the Canadian Air Force in 1939 and, as she never failed to remind me, both of them had been decorated.
“Anyone might think you don’t believe that intelligence work is important, darling.” I went over to the liquor tray and poured myself a scotch. “Drink?”
“No, thanks. You know, I think I worked out why it’s called intelligence. It’s because intelligent people like you always manage to stay well out of harm’s way.”
“Someone has to keep an eye on what the Germans are up to.” I swallowed some of the scotch, which tasted good and warmed my insides pleasingly after Roosevelt’s embalming fluid. “But if it gives you a kick trying to make me feel yellow, then go ahead. I can take it.”
“Maybe that’s what bothers me most.”
“I’m not bothered that you’re bothered.”
“So that’s how it works. Philosophy.” Diana leaned forward in her armchair and stubbed out her cigarette. “What’s this report about, anyway? That the president of the United States wants you to write.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“I don’t see what there is to be cagey about.”
“I’m not being cagey. I’m being secretive. There’s a big difference. If I were being cagey, I might let you stroke my fur, fold my ears, and tickle it out of me. Secretive means that I’ll swallow my poison pill before I let that happen.”
For a moment her nostrils looked pinched. “Never put off what you can do today,” she said.
“Thank you, dear. But I can tell you this. I’m going to have to go to London for a week or two.”
Her face relaxed a little and a smile played a quiet little duet on her lips.
“London? Haven’t you heard, Willy dear? The Germans are bombing the place. It might be dangerous for you.” Her voice was gently mocking.
“I did kind of hear that, yes,” I said. “Which is why I’m glad to be going. So I can look myself in the eye when I’m shaving in the morning. After fifteen months sitting behind a desk on Twenty-third Street, it strikes me that maybe I should have joined the navy after all.”
“Goodness. Such heroism. I think I will have that drink.”
I poured her one, the way she preferred it, neat, like the Bryn Mawr way Diana occupied a chair, knees pressed chastely together. As I handed it to her, she took it out of my fingers and then held my hand, pressing it close to her marble-cool cheek. “You know I don’t mean a word of anything I say, don’t you?”
“Of course. It’s one of the reasons I’m so fond of you.”
“Some people fight bulls, ride to hounds, shoot birds. Me, I like to talk. It’s one of the two things I do really well.”
“Darling, you’re the Ladies Grand Champion of talk.”
She swallowed her scotch and bit her thumbnail as if to let me know it was just an appetizer and there were parts of me she would like to try her little bite on. Then she stood up and kissed me, her eyelids flickering as she kept on opening and closing them to see if I was ready to climb aboard the pleasure boat she had chartered for us.
“Why don’t we go upstairs and I’ll show you the other thing I do really well?”
I kissed her again, putting my whole self into it, like some ham who’d understudied John Barrymore.
“You go ahead,” I said when, after a while, we came up for air. “I’ll be there shortly. I have a little reading to do first. Some papers the president gave me.”
Her body stiffened in my arms and she seemed about to make another cutting remark. Then she checked herself.
“Don’t get the idea that you can use that excuse more than once,” she said. “I’m as patriotic as the next person. But I’m a woman, too.”
I nodded and kissed her again. “That’s the bit about you I like most of all.”
Diana pushed me away gently and grinned. “All right. Just don’t be too long. And if I’m asleep, see if you can use that giant brain of yours to figure out a way to wake me up.”
“I’ll try to think of something, Princess Aurora.”
I watched her go upstairs. She was worth watching. Her legs seemed designed to sell tickets at the Corcoran. I watched them to the tops of her stockings and then well beyond. For purely philosophical reasons, of course. All philosophers, Nietzsche said, have little understanding of women. But, then, he never watched Diana walk up a flight of stairs. I didn’t know a way of understanding ultimate reality that came close to observing the lacy, veined phenomenon that was Diana’s underwear.
Trying to shake this particular natural knowledge from my mind, I made myself a pot of coffee, found a new packet of cigarettes on the desk in my study, and sat down to look through the files given to me by Roosevelt.
The report compiled by the German War Crimes Bureau contained the most detail. But it was the British report, written by Sir Owen O’Malley, ambassador to the Polish government in exile, and prepared with the help of the Polish army, that detained me the longest. O’Malley’s exhaustive report was vividly written and included
