Schmidt looked pained. “Good Lord, no.” He shook his head. “I was just asking.”
“No, I’m not fucking married.” I shook my head bitterly. “I had a girl. A really nice girl. A girl I should have married. And now-well, now she’s gone. I’m not exactly sure why or even how, but I blew it.” I shrugged. “I miss her a lot. More than I thought possible.”
“I see.” Schmidt nodded. “Then we’re in the same boat.”
“Not for much longer if you carry on like you did just now. They’ll put you off at the next desert island.”
Schmidt smiled, his pudgy face a mixture of sympathy and irony. I didn’t much care for the sympathy, but the irony looked interesting.
“You don’t understand,” he said, taking off his glasses and cleaning them furiously. “The day before I came on this ship, my wife, Debbie, told me that she was going to leave me.” He swallowed hard and chipped me another twitching smile. It landed right on top of the large bag of self-pity I’d been carrying ever since coming on board the Iowa.
“I’m sorry.” I sat down and poured us both a drink. Short of fetching the ship’s chaplain, it seemed like the proper thing to do. “Did she say why?”
“She’s been having an affair. I guess if I’m honest, I knew she was up to something. She was always out somewhere. I didn’t want to ask, you know? In case my worst suspicions were confirmed. And now they are.”
He took the drink and stared at it as if he knew it wasn’t the answer. So I lit a cigarette and fed it between Schmidt’s lips.
“Do you know the other guy?”
“I did know him.” He smiled sheepishly as he caught my eye registering his use of past tense. “It’s a little more complicated than you might suppose. But I have to tell someone, I guess. Can you keep this to yourself, Willard?”
“Of course. You have my word.”
Schmidt swallowed the drink and then took a suicidally long drag on his cigarette.
“The other man is dead.” He smiled bitterly and added, “She’s leaving me for a dead man, Willard. Can you beat that?”
I shook my head. I couldn’t even get near to beating it. I didn’t even know the name of the guy I’d seen with Diana on the rug in her living room.
Schmidt snorted with laughter and then wiped tears from his eyes. “Not just any dead man, mind you. No, she had to pick the most infamous dead man in Washington.”
I frowned as I tried to figure out who Ted Schmidt could have been referring to. There was only one infamous dead man in Washington I could think of whom Ted Schmidt might have known. “Jesus, Ted, you don’t mean Thornton Cole.”
Schmidt nodded. “I do mean Thornton Cole.”
“But wasn’t he…?”
“That’s what the Metro police said. I did some checking. They’re working on the assumption that Cole went to Franklin Park to have sex with a male prostitute, who then robbed and murdered him. But you can take it from me, Thornton Cole was certainly not homosexual.”
“And you know that for sure?”
“Debbie is carrying his baby. I know that for sure. We hadn’t made love in a very long time. Cole is the father, all right. It’s all in the letter she wrote me the day before I got on this stinking tub.”
“You say you haven’t told anyone else about this.”
Schmidt shook his head. “No one else knows. Except you.”
“Well, don’t you think you should tell someone? The police?”
“Oh, sure. I want everyone in Washington to know that another man was fucking my wife. Yes, good idea, Willard. Like I said, I only just found out about it myself. And who am I going to tell? The captain?”
“You’re right. There’s never a cop around when you need one.” I shrugged. “How about the Secret Service?”
“Then what? We’re maintaining radio silence, remember?”
“You’re going to have to tell someone. A man was murdered, Ted. If the Metro cops knew Cole was having an affair with your wife, they could hardly treat the murder as some kind of pansy thing. There must be more to it than that.”
Schmidt laughed. “Sure. Maybe they’ll think it was domestic. That I killed him. Have you thought about that? I tell them what I know and the next thing, I’m a suspect. I’m not so sure Debbie doesn’t think I had something to do with it, anyway. Because I would have killed him if I’d had the opportunity, not to mention the guts. I can just see it. I tell those guys and I’ll find myself arrested the minute I step off this ship.” He shook his head. “Secret Service, FBI. I don’t trust any of these bastards. The only reason I’m talking to you is because we knew each other at Harvard. Sort of.” Schmidt brought the glass up to his lips before he realized he’d already drunk the contents. “I’m not a drunk, Willard. I don’t normally drink. But what else do you do in a case like this?”
“Don’t ask me. I’m a stranger here myself.” I poured us both another. What the hell, I thought, we were brothers in suffering.
“Besides, there’s another reason I don’t want the Secret Service and the FBI crawling all over my life. Something John Weitz said.”
“Oh, forget him.”
“I’ve always sympathized with the Communist movement, Will. Ever since Harvard. I guess that does make me a sort of fellow traveler, just like he said.”
“It’s one thing to sympathize and quite another to belong,” I told him firmly. He may have outranked me in human suffering, but I wasn’t going to let him outrank me in political radicalism. “You never belonged to the Communist Party, did you?”
“No, of course not. I never had the guts to join.”
“Then you’ve got nothing to worry about. Since Pearl, we’re all fellow travelers. That’s the only decent line to take. That’s what this Big Three is all about. John Weitz needs to remember that. I don’t think FDR would appreciate some of the things he said in the mess just now. And I happen to know for a fact that your views about the Soviet Union are pretty much in accordance with the president’s.”
“Thanks, Willard.”
“You know, some of the president’s Secret Service detail. They’re not so bad.”
“You really think I should tell them what I know?”
“Yes. Let me tell you why. Thornton Cole worked on the German desk, right?”
Schmidt nodded. “I didn’t know him well, but by all accounts he was pretty good at his job.”
“Have you considered the possibility that there’s a security aspect to this whole story? Maybe he found out something that was connected to his German work at State. Could be that’s what got him killed.”
“You mean, like a German spy?”
“Why not? A year ago the FBI picked up eight German spies in New York. The Long Island spy ring? But there must be others. That’s one of the things that keeps Hoover in a job.”
“I never thought of that.”
“In which case, and I hate to say this, but it’s just possible that Debbie might be in some danger, too. Perhaps she knows something. Something about Thornton Cole. Something that could get her killed.” I shrugged. “Assuming you don’t actually want her dead, that is.”
“I still love her, Will.”
“Yeah. I know what that feels like.”
“So which one of the agents do you think I should speak to? I mean, you’ve spoken to some of them, right?”
I thought about my previous day’s conversation on the subject of “What is philosophy?”
“I don’t know. Agent Rauff seems quite intelligent,” I said, recalling one of their names. And then another. “Pawlikowski isn’t such a bad guy.”
“For a Polack,” laughed Schmidt.
“You got something against Polacks?” I asked.
“Me, I’m German, like you,” replied Schmidt. “We’ve got something against nearly everyone.”
