see if there’s any room for future diplomatic maneuver. I can give you all kinds of reasons if I sit here long enough.”
“Do we tell the president?” Hopkins asked. “Mike?”
Mike Reilly had a look on his face that suggested he’d hit a brick wall. I kicked his thought processes aside and pressed on with my own. “For now I’d like to keep this between the four of us. Perhaps the Metro Police in D.C. will turn up something more that will help us get a lead on this guy.”
“Under the circumstances, this might be a job for the FBI. What do you say, Mike?”
“I’m inclined to agree, sir.”
Reilly’s brain. You could almost see it jerking around in his skull, as if Hopkins had tapped it with a small reflex hammer. I smiled, trying to contain my irritation with them both.
“That’s your call. But my feeling would be not to mention this to anyone until we know a little more. We wouldn’t want to spook anyone. Especially the president.”
“It sounds to me as though you might already suspect someone,” said Reilly.
I had obviously thought about this. There was John Weitz, who had threatened to kill Ted Schmidt. And there were some of Reilly’s colleagues in the Secret Service. On the night he disappeared from the Iowa, Schmidt had asked the chief petty officer to direct him to the Secret Service quarters. Could one of them have lured him up on deck to kill him? Disliking almost all of them, I was finding it hard to fix on one particular suspect. Agent Rauff had a name he shared with a Gestapo commander. Agent Pawlikowski looked like one of Hitler’s blond beasts. And hadn’t Agent Qualter expressed what seemed to be the popular view, that Stalin was as bad as Hitler? Killing Stalin, killing Roosevelt, killing the Big Three, or just trying to take the measure of the alliance-there was no shortage of possible motives for a German spy among our number.
“Maybe,” I told Reilly. “Maybe not. But I’d still like to keep the lid on this for a while. In the hope that our man might reveal himself. Getting the FBI involved might prevent that from happening.”
“All right,” agreed Reilly. “We’ll do it your way, Professor. But just in case, we’ll double the detail guarding the president.”
“Keep us posted, Professor,” Hopkins told me as I went out the door. “If there are any developments, let us know immediately.”
“If someone shoots me, you’ll know I wasn’t exaggerating,” I told him.
I went back outside to my car. All that talk about a German spy had prompted me to recall my own secretly precarious situation. It was time I checked to see how Major Reichleitner was coming along with Donovan’s Bride.
“Where to, boss?” asked Coogan.
“Grey Pillars.”
I had left a five-pound note with the duty corporal to provide cigarettes, medicine, and some decent food and water for the prisoner. Entering the cell, I found the major much recovered and working diligently on Donovan’s Bride material. Thanking me for the extra supplies, he told me he was making excellent progress with the signals transcripts and he might have some plaintexts to show me by the end of the week.
“Good. Sounds as though it will be just in time. We’re flying to Teheran on Saturday morning.”
“So it is Teheran. But don’t they know? The place is full of German sympathizers.”
I shrugged. “I tried telling them. But I’m beginning to suspect FDR thinks he walks on water.”
“On water, no,” said Reichleitner. “But on oil, perhaps. If they’re having the conference there it’s because they’ll all be trying to get the shah to commit to a cheap oil price, in perpetuity.”
“Maybe he can give me a good deal on a rug while he’s at it.”
“By the way. Did you give Roosevelt the Beketovka File?”
“Not yet.” What with seeing Elena again, and being shot at, I had forgotten all about the file now lying on a table in my hotel room. “I’m still trying to get some time with the president so I can bring it to his attention.”
“But you’ve read it yourself.”
“Of course,” I said, thinking I could hardly say I hadn’t and still retain the German’s goodwill. I resolved to try to read the file the moment I got back to Shepheard’s.
“And what do you think?”
“It’s shocking. I think it confirms what a lot of people in this city seem to believe already. That Stalin is as great a threat as Hitler.”
Reichleitner nodded his approval. “He is. He is.”
“To be honest with you, though, I’m not sure it’s going to have much of an immediate influence on Roosevelt. After all, he managed to ignore all the evidence about Katyn.”
“But this time the numbers are so much greater. It’s evidence of a pattern of mass murder and neglect on an industrial scale. If Roosevelt can make an alliance with a man like Stalin, then there’s no reason why he couldn’t make a deal with Hitler himself.”
I nodded uncomfortably. I wondered what Max Reichleitner would have said if I had told him what Donovan had told me: that FDR was indeed pursuing an American peace with Hitler. I told myself he wouldn’t have believed a word of it.
When I got back to Shepheard’s, I picked up the Beketovka File, feeling guilty about the lie I had told. I moved the armchair near the open window, but in the shade. I put a package of cigarettes on the side table next to a cold beer, my notebook, and my fountain pen. Then I dived in. It was a like diving into a dark pond to find that there was something unseen just beneath the opaque surface, like a rusty iron bedstead. The hidden object was a monograph by Heinrich Zahler. I hit my head on it. Hard.
My name is Heinrich Zahler and I was a lieutenant in the 76th Infantry Division of the German 6th Army that surrendered to the Soviets on January 31, 1943. I was born in Bremen, on March 1, 1921, but I don’t expect to live to see Bremen again or, for that matter, my next birthday. I am writing now in the hope that this secretly written letter (if these writing materials are discovered, I will be executed immediately) will reach my parents. My father, Friedrich, works for the docks and harbor board in Bremerhaven, and my mother, Hannah, is a midwife at the University Hospital in Bremen. I want to tell them how very much I love them both and to abandon any hope of ever seeing me again. Death is the only escape from this, the deepest pit in hell. Attempts to take POWs out of Stalingrad began immediately after we surrendered, when the Popovs had tired of beating us. But almost all the rolling stock was required to supply the Russian front at Rostov, and so most of us were obliged to march to the camp where we are now imprisoned. Some were loaded into cattle-trucks awaiting the arrival of a steam locomotive that never came, and after a week the cars were opened again and it was discovered that all of the men inside, some 3,000 officers and private personnel, were dead. But thousands more died of typhus, dysentery, frostbite, and wounds received in the battle before they could even leave the provisional POW camp at Stalingrad. In retrospect, they were the lucky ones. The march to the camp that was to be our final destination took five days. We walked in all weathers, without food or water or any kind of shelter. Those who could not walk were shot or clubbed to death, or sometimes just stripped and left to freeze to death. Many thousands more died on the march here. And perhaps they were lucky, too. This is the largest of the Russian POW camps-Camp Number 108, at Beketovka. It is what the Russians call a katorga. That means hard labor, low rations, and no medical attention other than that which we can provide for ourselves, which is very little. The site of the camp was formerly a school, but it is hard to believe that children could ever have been educated in such a place as this. The school was partly destroyed during the battle for Stalingrad, which means that there are no windows, no doors, and no beds; there is no roof or furniture of any kind; anything made of wood was burned long ago to provide heat for Red Army soldiers. The only fuel we have is our own dried human feces. We sleep on the floor, without blankets, huddled together for warmth in temperatures as low as -35 degrees centigrade. When we arrived, there was no food or water, and many men died from eating snow. After two days they gave us a kind of watery bran that a horse or a dog would have ignored; even today, months after our arrival, none of us eats more than a few ounces of bread a day-if bread is what it is: this bread has more grit in it than the soles on a roadworker’s boots. Sometimes, as a special treat, we boil potato peelings for soup, and whenever we can, we smoke the dust off the floor-a Russian solution to the problem of the lack of tobacco, which they call “scratch.” Every morning when we pick ourselves off the floor we discover that as many as fifty of us have died during the night. A week after my arrival here I awoke to find that Sergeant Eisenhauer, a man who saved my life on more than one occasion, was dead and frozen hard to the ground, and hardly recognizable, for the rats feast on the extremities of the dead in the short time that remains
