The Iowa and its escort group were due to come through the Straits of Gibraltar at night, under a blackout. That had been the intention, but powerful Spanish searchlights had managed to mark the ship out, providing a very easy target for any German submarines that might have been in the area. I’ve never liked cruises very much. But we were lucky.
The ship finally anchored at Oran, where Mike Reilly, the head of the White House Secret Service detail, came aboard to supervise the president’s disembarkation. With the ship’s entire crew mustered on deck, FDR was lifted into a motorized whaleboat on the port side of the ship and then lowered into the water, whereupon his boat came around to the gangway and Harry Hopkins and the Secret Service climbed in alongside their beaming president.
I had expected to want to kiss dry land when once again I was standing upon it. Instead, I almost fell on it. It felt strange to be on land, and I lurched unsteadily as my legs, used to compensating for the movement of a ship’s deck underneath my feet, adjusted suddenly to being on solid ground. But it’s also possible I was just a little drunk.
There was hardly time to look around Algeria’s second-largest city and its busy port, where infamously the British had bombed the French navy, before a U.S. Army sergeant with a Wiener schnitzel ear and a nose like a bicycle saddle asked me for my name. When I gave it to him he handed me a slip of paper showing two numbers, and directed John Weitz and me to the car that, as a part of the presidential motorcade, would transport us fifty miles to the United States Army airstrip at La Senia.
It was nine o’clock in the morning and the air was already as warm as a Louisiana bread oven. I took off my coat and fanned myself with my hat. The boat landing was thick with the oily exhausts of U.S. Military Police motorcycles as they revved loudly, impatient to escort the presidential party through the streets of the thousand- year-old city. It looked like a proper seaport with a castle and a church, and reminded me of a coastal town in the south of France. I imagined that was the way the French liked it. The only trouble was that there were three- quarters of a million Algerian Arabs living in it. The place looked friendly enough. But then, we weren’t French.
John Weitz and I found our car. The American MP driver saluted and handed us some American newspapers, a letter for Weitz, and a telegram for me that made my heart leap like a cat for a moment. The driver was the eager type, keen to show us how well he could drive a car along an empty desert road. Red-haired, red-faced, and red- eyed, as if he had been drinking. He hadn’t. It was the wind and the sand. Algeria seemed to have a monopoly on wind and sand. Red looked over our shoulders and told us that as soon as Mr. Schmidt showed up we could be on our way.
“He won’t be joining us,” I said. “I’m afraid he’s dead.”
“That’s too bad,” said Red. “What should I do with this, sir?” The MP showed me the telegram for Ted Schmidt.
“You can give that to me,” I told him. “And I have a letter for his widow that I’d like you to post for me.”
I climbed into the back of the car, alongside Weitz.
“Thanks again for doing that,” said Weitz. “Writing that letter to Schmidt’s wife. I really appreciate it.”
“No problem.”
I waited until the motorcade was under way before opening my own telegram. The optimist in me had hoped it might have been from Diana. But it was from Donovan, informing me that I should make contact with a Major Poole, the OSS man in Tunis, at the Cafe M’Rabet, that same afternoon.
Schmidt’s telegram was from the State Department. It was dated the previous day, Friday, November 19, and I read it through several times. Ted Schmidt’s widow had been killed in a car accident on Thursday afternoon.
The streets of Oran were lined with U.S. Army soldiers who came to attention as the motorcade swept through. The Algerians standing behind them waved hospitably at the most powerful man in the world, apparently, and his escort. I hardly noticed. The news that both of the people who had been in a position to shed more light on the murder of Thornton Cole were dead preoccupied me.
“Bad news?” asked Weitz.
“It seems that Ted’s widow was involved in a traffic accident the day before yesterday.”
“Oh, God. Is she okay?”
“She’s dead.”
“That’s terrible. What a terrible tragedy.” Weitz shook his head. “Did they have children?”
“No.”
“That’s something, I suppose.”
I leaned forward to speak to Red. “There’s no need to send that letter I gave you,” I told him. “The one for Mr. Schmidt’s widow? It seems she met with a fatal car accident.”
“That’s a rare coincidence,” observed Red.
“Yes, it is,” I said thoughtfully.
This coincidence might be less of a coincidence than it seemed. Debbie Schmidt’s accident may not have been an accident at all. She, too, might have been killed to ensure silence regarding Cole’s true sexual predilection. Which could have meant that I was very possibly the only person alive who knew that Thornton Cole had not been murdered in the scandalous way the Metro Police had believed.
At La Senia Airport half a dozen American C-54s were lined up to fly us the 653 miles to Tunis. And it was only then, as I saw everyone on the airstrip, that I realized just how large the U.S. delegation really was, for many more had joined it since our arrival in Oran. The Joint Chiefs, their liaison officers, military attaches, Secret Service men-all were lining up to board the planes. The delegation was set to get even bigger when yet more diplomats joined it in Tunis and Cairo.
To my surprise, I found myself assigned to the first plane, along with the president, Mike Reilly, the president’s personal bodyguard, and Harry Hopkins, whom I sat next to.
Reilly was a smooth-faced, dark-haired man, with hooded eyes and the hard look of a former bootlegger. He came from Montana, but it might just as well have been Connemara, with a touch of the Spanish Armada. He wore a double-breasted, nicely cut flannel suit and was never very far from Roosevelt’s right ear, into which he would sometimes whisper something important. He had dropped out of George Washington, where he had studied law, to work for the Farm Credit Administration, investigating cases of fraudulent lending agencies. Reilly transferred to the Secret Service in 1935, and in that capacity had always worked at the White House. This I learned from Harry Hopkins while we waited in the plane for Reilly and one of the other agents to carry Roosevelt bodily up the aircraft steps. Once the president was aboard, the doors were closed and the C-54 began to taxi up the runway.
“Did you know that there’s a town called Oran in the state of Iowa?” Hopkins asked me as the four Pratt amp; Whitney engines revved louder. “That’s my home state. Ever been to Sioux City, Professor? Don’t go. That’s my advice. There’s nothing there. My father was from Bangor, Maine, and he went west to look for gold. Never found any. He became a harness maker instead. You know anything about horses?”
I shook my head again.
“Keep it that way. Unpredictable animals. Dad got his leg broke by a runaway team in Chicago. Best thing that ever happened to him. He sued the freight-line owners for ten thousand dollars and bought a harness shop with the proceeds, in a place called Grinnell, Iowa. Don’t ask me why he went there. He hated the place. But we buried him there just the same.”
I smiled, and for the first time I saw why FDR liked having Hopkins around; in addition to a dry sense of humor, which the president seemed to share, there was something very commonsensical about Harry Hopkins.
Three and a half hours after leaving La Senia we reached El Aounia Airfield, about twelve miles northeast of Tunis. It was less than eight months since Allied forces had inflicted a decisive defeat on Rommel in the area, and wrecked aircraft still littered the ground on both sides of the runway. It was an unnerving sight to behold from the vantage point of a plane that had yet to land safely, even if the wrecks were German planes.
The president’s C-54 was met by his two sons, Elliott and Franklin Junior. Franklin Roosevelt Jr.’s ship, the USS Myrant, had suffered bomb damage at Palermo and was undergoing repairs at Gibraltar. At least that was the story they had put out. Meanwhile, Elliott Roosevelt commanded a photo-reconnaissance squadron that was stationed in the area.
We drove through the ruins of the ancient city of Carthage, destroyed by the Romans in 146 B.C., to Tunis, where, next to the Zitouna, the city’s largest mosque, FDR and his immediate party were staying in the famous Casa Blanca. Formerly the seat of the Tunisian government, the Casa Blanca was currently being used by General Eisenhower as his operational headquarters. Vacating the Casa Blanca for the duration of the president’s stay,
