“You’re joking.”
Pereira shrugged. “What would you do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Where I come from there is no other way.” By now Pereira was satisfied of two things: that Cole was alone and that he was not a cop or an FBI agent. Everything about Thornton Cole looked tailor-made, and his long, thin hands were not those of a policeman-perhaps a musician’s or an academic’s. Whoever this man was, he was certainly not a professional. “I am from Argentina.” In the darkness, Pereira retrieved a switchblade from his coat pocket and snapped it open. “And there we stab a man who screws your wife.”
Even as he uttered the words, Pereira plunged the knife into Cole’s body just beneath the sternum. It was an expert blow delivered by a man who’d killed before with a knife, and it penetrated Cole’s heart. He was dead before he hit the ground.
Pereira dragged the body into some bushes, wiped his knife on the dead man’s coat, and pocketed his wallet. Then he lifted the hand that had inflicted the lethal wound to inspect his sleeve and, finding some blood on the cuff of his shirt, slipped off his jacket for a moment and rolled up his sleeve. After this, he put his jacket back on and walked back to the distinguished Renaissance Revival building that was the Hamilton Hotel. As he entered, he passed Brutus on his way out. The two men ignored each other. In the light of the lobby Pereira checked himself for bloodstains and, finding none, wandered down to the bar where he knew Lovell White would be waiting for him.
Pereira, dark and handsome, could not have looked less like the short, fat, balding man with glasses who, seeing the Argentinean appear in the hotel bar, waved a waiter toward him and ordered two dry martinis. From the expression on Pereira’s face, he judged that he might need one.
“Well?” asked White as Pereira sat down.
“You were right. You were being followed.”
“Did he see me with our friend?”
“Yes, he saw you both. I’m certain of it.”
“Shit. That’s fixed us.”
“Relax. Everything is fixed.”
“Fixed? What do you mean, fixed?”
“The man who followed you is now dead. That’s what I mean.”
“Dead? Where? Jesus Christ. Who was he?”
Pereira picked up the Washington Post from the banquette where Lovell White was sitting and perused the front page coolly. “So, Il Duce is believed to be in Italy again,” he said.
“Never mind that for now,” whispered White. “What do you mean, he’s dead?”
“No, he’s in Italy. It says so right here, my friend.”
Lovell White grimaced and looked away. Sometimes Pereira was just a little too relaxed for his own good; but he knew there was no point in hurrying the Argentinean; he would explain only when he was good and ready. The waiter came back with the drinks, and Pereira drank his in two large gulps.
“I need another,” he said.
“Here, have mine. I don’t want it. And you look like you need it.”
Pereira nodded. “I followed him across to the park and stabbed him. Don’t worry. He’s tucked up for the night in some bushes. I don’t think anyone will find him until morning.”
“Well, who the hell was he?”
Pereira placed Thornton Cole’s wallet on the table. “You tell me,” he said.
White snatched the wallet off the table and opened it on his lap. A moment or two passed as he examined the contents. “Jesus Christ, I know this guy,” he said at last.
“Knew,” said Pereira, beginning his second martini.
“He’s from the State Department.”
“I didn’t think he was a cop.” Pereira took out a gold cigarette case and lit a Fleetwood. “Too Ivy League to be a cop.”
White rubbed his fleshy chin nervously. “I wonder if he was on to us. If he told anyone else about me.”
“I don’t think so. He was on his own.”
“How can you be sure about that?”
“Do you think I’d be sitting here now if he were working with someone else?” said Pereira.
“No, I guess not.” White shook his head. “I don’t get it. Why would Thornton Cole be following me?”
“Perhaps he was queer for you.”
“Very funny.”
“I wasn’t joking.”
“The question is, what are we going to do about this?”
“Do?” Pereira grinned. “I think I’ve done everything that can be done, don’t you?”
“Oh, no. No, no, no. You don’t just murder someone from the U.S. State Department and expect it to be treated like an ordinary street killing. There will be a major inquiry. In which case it’s possible the Metro police might find something that will explain why Cole was tailing me.” He nodded thoughtfully. “On the other hand, maybe there’s a way we can close down this investigation before it even gets started. To cripple an inquiry from the very outset.”
“Is there such a way?”
White stood up. “Finish that drink and show me where you left the body. We have to make this look like the real thing. To dress the set, so to speak.”
The two men walked out of the hotel.
“So why do queers come here and not somewhere else?”
“They have to go somewhere,” said White. “But maybe they come here for sentimental reasons. Frances Hodgson Burnett, the author of Little Lord Fauntleroy, used to live just off this square. But the truth is, I don’t know. Who knows how these things get started?”
Pereira showed him where Thornton Cole’s body was hidden, and for a moment White stared at the corpse with something close to fascination. He had never before seen a dead body, and in the darkness Cole looked hardly dead at all.
“Come on,” urged Pereira. “Do whatever the fuck you’re going to do and let’s get out of here.”
“All right.” He pocketed the money from Cole’s wallet and tossed it on the ground beside the body. Then he took a book of matches and a ticket from Rigg’s Turkish Bath on Fifteenth and G Streets from his own vest pocket and slipped them into Cole’s pockets. The matchbook was from a private club in Glover Park and, like the Turkish bath, was well-known to the police as a haunt of Washington’s homosexual community.
Bending over the body, he undid Cole’s fly buttons.
“What the hell are you doing?” hissed Pereira.
“Just keep a look out and shut up.” White pulled the dead man’s penis out of his pants. “I know what I’m doing. This kind of thing happens all the time, believe me. And I already told you about the reputation of this park. By the time I’ve finished here, this is going to be one investigation they’re going to want to keep very quiet.” White undid his own fly buttons. The way he saw it, Thornton Cole’s murder was going to make the Sumner Welles scandal look like a Sunday school picnic.
Taking out his own penis, he began to masturbate.
The OSS occupied a complex of four redbrick buildings at 2430 E Street, on the corner of Twenty-third Street and the Foggy Bottom bank of the Potomac River. When the OSS had moved into the E Street building, they discovered two dozen monkeys-medical research subjects-that the National Institutes of Health had left behind, and this had prompted Radio Berlin to remark that FDR had a team working for him that included fifty professors, twenty monkeys, and a staff of Jewish scribblers.
At the time I didn’t think the Germans were so very far from the truth. I was impressed that they should have known as much about the OSS as evidently they did. Especially the bit about the monkeys.
Further along E Street a brewery lent the air a strong, pungent smell that prompted me to remember all that was sour in my life. I was one of Roosevelt’s Jewish scribblers. The only trouble was I felt like one of the monkeys. A monkey deprived of a tree to swing in and without a banana.
