“It smells a lot like coffee. How do you make it?”
“With a little brandy. There’s more in the car outside. Brandy, I mean. It’s just the thing to settle the stomach ahead of a long flight.”
“Where are we going?”
“Teheran, of course.”
“Teheran, huh? I hear it’s a dump.”
“It is. That’s why we want you along.”
“What about the British?”
“They’re coming, too.”
“I meant the police.”
“Harry Hopkins has spent the last thirty-six hours pulling strings for you,” said Reilly. “It seems both he and the president regard your presence in Teheran as absolutely essential.” He shook his head and lit a cigarette. “Don’t ask me why. I have no idea.”
“My things at the hotel-”
“Are in the car outside. You can wash, shave, and change your clothes in a room upstairs.”
“And the murder charges?”
“Dropped.” Reilly handed me my wristwatch. “Here. I even wound it for you.”
I glanced at the time. It was five-thirty in the morning. “What time is our flight?”
“Six-thirty.”
“Then there’s still time to drop into Grey Pillars.”
Reilly was shaking his head.
“C’mon, Reilly, we’ve got to cross the Nile to get to the airport, so Garden City is on our way. More or less.” I glanced up again at the barred window. Outside, the early-morning sky looked very different from its usual bright shade of orange. “Besides, haven’t you noticed the fog? I’ll be very surprised if we take off on time.”
“My orders are to get you to the airport, Professor Mayer. At all costs.”
“Good. That makes things easy for us both, then. Unless we go to Grey Pillars first, I’m not going to Teheran.”
Grey Pillars was only two miles west of the Citadel, and the journey, by official car, took but a few minutes. The British GHQ was always open for business and, showered and shaved and wearing the clean clothes Reilly had brought from Shepheard’s Hotel, I had little difficulty in gaining access again to the cells in the basement. I found Corporal Armfield just coming off duty.
“I’m here to see Major Reichleitner,” I told the bemused corporal.
“But he’s gone, sir. Transferred to a POW transport last night. On Major Deakin’s orders. He turned up here with your General Donovan, sir, wanting to know about some codebooks, sir. Major Reichleitner told your General Donovan that he’d burned them all, at which point the general got rather upset with him, sir. After that, he and Deakin had a bit of a chat like, and it was decided to put Reichleitner on a POW ship leaving Alexandria this morning.”
“Where’s the ship going, Corporal?”
“Belfast, sir.”
“Belfast? Did he leave a message for me?”
“No, sir. On account of how the general told him you’d been arrested on suspicion of being a German spy. Major Reichleitner seemed to think that was quite funny, sir. Very funny indeed. Fair roared with laughter.”
“I bet he did. What else did Donovan tell him? Did he tell him that I was accused of murder? About that woman who was shot?”
“No, sir. I was standing in the doorway all the time they were in there and I heard every word.”
So Reichleitner didn’t know that his girlfriend was dead. Perhaps that was just as well. A man facing a stretch in a POW camp in Northern Ireland needed something to look forward to.
“Have you heard? My arrest was a mistake. Just in case you were wondering, Corporal.”
“I was sort of wondering that, sir,” grinned Armfield.
“It’s been nice knowing you, Corporal. I’m pleased to see that not all the English are bastards.”
“Oh, they are, sir. I’m Welsh.”
Reilly was waiting impatiently in the back of the car, and even before I had closed the door, we were speeding west across the English Bridge and dashing between the limousines of the British pashas, the ice carts, the gold-and-tinsel hearses, the handcarts, the donkeys, and the gharries. “Are we flying via Basra?” I asked Reilly.
“There’s typhus in Basra. And, for all I know, Nazi paratroopers, too. Besides, it’s a hell of a train journey from Basra to Teheran. Even in the shah’s personal train.” He offered me a cigarette and then lit us both. “No, we’re flying direct to Teheran. That’s if we ever get through this goddamned Cairo traffic.”
“I like the Cairo traffic,” I said. “It’s honest.”
Reilly handed me his hip flask. “Looks like you were right,” he said, nodding out of the window at the fog.
“I’m always right,” I told Reilly. “That’s why I became a philosopher.”
“I just figured out why they want you along, Professor,” he said. “You’re easier to carry than a set of encyclopedias.”
I took a swig of his brandy. And then another.
“Better make it last. That’s breakfast until we get to Teheran.”
I was starting to like him again, thinking maybe there was more under his Panama hat than a thick head of black-Irish hair.
There were several planes on the runway at Cairo Airport, and Reilly directed me toward the president’s own C-54. I climbed aboard and sat down alongside Harry Hopkins. It was as if nothing had happened. I shook hands with Hopkins. I shook hands with Roosevelt. I even exchanged a few jokes with John Weitz.
“Nice of you to join us, Professor,” said Hopkins.
“I’m very glad to be here, sir. I understand from Reilly that but for you I wouldn’t be here at all.”
“Don’t mention it.”
“I’ll try not to, sir.”
Hopkins nodded happily. “It’s all behind us now. All forgotten. Besides, we couldn’t afford to leave you behind, Willard. We’re going to have need of your linguistic skills.”
“But surely the only foreign language that’s going to be spoken at the Big Three is Russian.”
Hopkins shook his head. “The shah went to school in Switzerland. And I think you are aware of his father’s hatred of the British. Hence, His Majesty speaks only French and German. Because of the delicacy of the political situation in Iran, it was decided to keep any meetings between Reza Shah and the Big Three a secret. For the sake of the shah himself. He’s only twenty-four years old and not yet secure on the throne. Until thirty-six hours ago, we weren’t exactly sure he would risk meeting us at all. That’s why you haven’t been kept informed of what was happening. We didn’t know ourselves. After the war, oil is going to be the key to world power. There’s an ocean of the stuff underneath Iran. It’s why the president agreed to come here in the first place.”
I was already forming the strong impression that, but for my German-language skills, I would still be in a prison cell in Cairo facing a murder charge. Yet even now there was something about Hopkins’s story that didn’t quite add up.
“Then, with all due respect, wouldn’t it have been better to have brought someone along who speaks Farsi?” When Hopkins looked at me blankly, I added, “That’s the Persian name for the modern Persian language, sir.”
“Easier said than done. Even Dreyfus, our ambassador in Teheran, doesn’t speak the local lingo. Hungarian and a little French, but no Farsi. Our State Department isn’t up to snuff in terms of linguists, I’m afraid. Nor anything else, for that matter.”
I glanced around. John Weitz, the State Department’s Russian-language specialist and Bohlen’s substitute, was sitting right behind me, and, having clearly heard Hopkins’s remark, he raised his eyebrows at me with a show of diplomatic patience. A few moments later he got out of his seat to walk back to the plane’s tiny lavatory. Meanwhile, the president, Elliott Roosevelt, Mike Reilly, Averell Harriman, Agent Pawlikowski, and the Joint Chiefs were each of them staring out of the windows as the plane flew over the Suez Canal near Ismailia.
“Since we’re speaking frankly, sir,” I said, taking advantage of Weitz’s absence, “it’s still my belief that we
