by Philip Kerr
Roosevelt shook his head wearily.
“You can guess what happened. Not a goddamned thing! Hull is blaming everything on Welles, of course, claiming Welles must have been sitting on these files for weeks.
“It’s true, I had given the files to Welles and asked him to get someone on the German desk at State to make a report. Then Welles had his heart attack, and cleared his desk, offering me his resignation. Which I refused.
“Meanwhile, Hull told the fellow on the German desk, Thornton Cole, to give the files to Bill Bullitt, to see what our former ambassador to Soviet Russia might make of them. Bullitt fancies himself a Russia expert.
“I don’t actually know if Bullitt looked at the files. He’d been after Welles’s job for a while and I suspect he was too busy lobbying for it to pay them much attention. When I asked Hull about Katyn Forest, he and Bullshitt realized that they’d fucked up and decided to quietly return the files to Welles’s office and blame him for not having done anything. Of course Hull made sure to have Cole back up his story.” Roosevelt shrugged. “That’s Welles’s best guess about what must have happened. And I think I agree with him.”
It was about then that I remembered I had once introduced Welles to Cole, at Washington’s Metropolitan Club.
“When Hull returned the files and told me that we weren’t in a position to have any kind of view on Katyn Forest,” Roosevelt continued, “I used every short word known to a sailor. And the upshot of all this is that nothing has been done.” The president pointed at some dusty-looking files stacked on a bookshelf. “Would you mind fetching them down for me? They’re up there.”
I retrieved the files, laid them on the sofa beside the president, and then inspected my hands. The job did not augur well, given the amount of grime on my fingers.
“It’s no great secret that sometime before Christmas I’m going to have a conference with Churchill and Stalin. Not that I’ve any clue where that will be. Stalin has rejected coming to London, so we could wind up almost anywhere. But wherever we end up meeting I want to have a clear idea on this Katyn Forest situation, because it seems certain to affect the future of Poland. The Russians have already broken off diplomatic relations with the Polish government in London. The British, of course, feel a special loyalty to the Poles. After all, they went to war for Poland. So, as you can see, it’s a delicate situation.”
The president lit another cigarette and then rested a hand on the bundle of files.
“Which brings me to you, Professor Mayer. I want you to conduct your own investigation into these Katyn Forest claims. Start by making an objective assessment of what the files contain, but don’t feel you have to limit yourself to them. Speak to anyone you think would be of use. Make up your own mind and then write a report for my eyes only. Nothing too long. Just a summary of your findings with some suggested courses of action. I’ve cleared it with Donovan, so this takes priority over anything else you’re doing.”
Taking out his own handkerchief, he wiped his hand clean of dust, and didn’t touch the files again.
“How long do I have, Mr. President?”
“Two or three weeks. It’s not long, I know, for a matter of such gravity, but as you can appreciate, that can’t be helped. Not now.”
“When you say ‘speak to anyone who might be of use,’ does that include people in London? Members of the Polish government in exile? People in the British Foreign Office? And how much of a nuisance am I allowed to make of myself ?”
“Speak to whomever you like,” insisted Roosevelt. “If you do decide to go to London, it will help if you say that you’re my special representative. That will open every door to you. My secretary, Grace Tully, will organize the necessary paperwork for you. Only, try not to express any opinions. And avoid saying anything that will make people think you’re speaking in my name. As I said, this is a very delicate situation, but whatever happens, I’d very much like to avoid this coming between myself and Stalin. Is that clearly understood?”
Clear enough. I was to be a mutt with no balls and just my master’s collar to let people know I had the right to piss on his flowers. But I fixed a smile to my face and, brushing some stars and stripes onto my words, piped, “Yes, sir, I understand you perfectly.”
WHEN I GOT BACK HOME, Diana was waiting for me, full of excited questions.
“Well?” she said. “What happened?”
“He makes a terrible martini,” I said. “That’s what happened.”
“You had drinks with him?”
“Just the two of us. As if he was Nick and I was Nora Charles.”
“What was it like?”
“Too much gin. And way too cold. Like a country house party in England.”
“I meant, what did you talk about?”
“Among other things, philosophy.”
“Philosophy?” Diana pulled a face, and sat down. Already she was looking less excited. “That’s easier on the stomach than sleeping pills, I guess.”
Diana Vandervelden was rich, loud, glamorous, and drily funny in a way that always put me in mind of one of Hollywood’s tougher leading ladies, say Bette Davis or Katharine Hepburn. Formidably intelligent, she was easily bored and had given up a place at Bryn Mawr to play women’s golf, almost winning the U.S. Women’s Amateur title in 1936. The year after that she had quit competition golf to marry a senator. “When I met my husband it was love at first sight,” she was fond of saying. “But that’s because I was too cheap to buy glasses.” Diana was herself not very political, preferring writers and artists to senators, and, despite her many accomplishments in the salon—she was an excellent cook and was famous for giving some of the best dinner parties in Washington—she had quickly tired of being married to her lawyer husband: “I was always cooking for his Republican friends,” she later complained to me. “Pearls before swine. And you needed the whole damn oyster farm.” When she left her husband in 1940, Diana had set up her own decorating business, which was how she and I had first met. Soon after I moved to Washington, a mutual friend had suggested I hire her to fix up my home in Kalorama Heights. “A philosopher’s house, huh? Let’s see, now. How would that look? How about a lot of mirrors, all at navel height?” Our friends expected us to get married, but Diana took a dim view of marriage. So did I.
Right from the beginning my relationship with Diana had been intensely sexual, which suited us both just fine. We were very fond of each other, but neither of us ever talked much about love. “We love each other,” I had told Diana the previous Christmas, “in the way people do when they love themselves just a little more.”
And I loved it that Diana hated philosophy. The last thing I was looking for was someone who wanted to talk about my subject. I liked women. Especially when they were as intelligent and witty as Diana. I just didn’t like it when they wanted to talk about logic. Philosophy can be a stimulating companion in the salon, but it’s a dreadful bore in the bedroom.
“What else did Roosevelt talk about?”
“War work. He wants me to write a report on something.”
“How very heroic,” she said, lighting a cigarette. “What do you get for that? A medal on a typewriter ribbon?”
I grinned, enjoying her show of scorn. Both Diana’s brothers had enlisted in the Canadian Air Force in 1939 and, as she never failed to remind me, both of them had been decorated.
“Anyone might think you don’t believe that intelligence work is important, darling.” I went over to the liquor tray and poured myself a scotch. “Drink?”
“No, thanks. You know, I think I worked out why it’s called intelligence. It’s because intelligent people like you always manage to stay well out of harm’s way.”
“Someone has to keep an eye on what the Germans are up to.” I swallowed some of the scotch, which tasted good and warmed my insides pleasingly after Roosevelt’s embalming fluid. “But if it gives you a kick trying to make me feel yellow, then go ahead. I can take it.”
“Maybe that’s what bothers
me most.”
“I’m not bothered that you’re bothered.”
“So that’s how it works. Philosophy.” Diana leaned forward in her armchair and stubbed out her cigarette. “What’s this report about, anyway? That the president of the United States wants you to write.”
“I can’t tell you.”
“I don’t see what there is to be cagey about.”
“I’m not being cagey. I’m being secretive. There’s a big difference. If I were being cagey, I might let you stroke my fur, fold my ears, and tickle it out of me. Secretive means that I’ll swallow my poison pill before I let that happen.”
For a moment her nostrils looked pinched. “Never put off what you can do today,” she said.
“Thank you, dear. But I can tell you this. I’m going to have to go to London for a week or two.”
Her face relaxed a little and a smile played a quiet little duet on her lips.
“London? Haven’t you heard, Willy dear? The Germans are bombing the place. It might be dangerous for you.” Her voice was gently mocking.
“I did kind of hear that, yes,” I said. “Which is why I’m glad to be going. So I can look myself in the eye when I’m shaving in the morning. After fifteen months sitting behind a desk on Twenty-third Street, it strikes me that maybe I should have joined the navy after all.”
“Goodness. Such heroism. I think I will have that drink.”
I poured her one, the way she preferred it, neat, like the Bryn Mawr way Diana occupied a chair, knees pressed chastely together. As I handed it to her, she took it out of my fingers and then held my hand, pressing it close to her marble-cool cheek. “You know I don’t mean a word of anything I say, don’t you?”
“Of course. It’s one of the reasons I’m so fond of you.”
“Some people fight bulls, ride to hounds, shoot birds. Me, I like to talk. It’s one of the two things I do really well.”
“Darling, you’re the Ladies Grand Champion of talk.”
She swallowed her scotch and bit her thumbnail as if to let me know it was just an appetizer and there were parts of me she would like to try her little bite on. Then she stood up and kissed me, her eyelids flickering as she kept on opening and closing them to see if I was ready to climb aboard the pleasure boat she had chartered for us.
“Why don’t we go upstairs and I’ll show you the other thing I do really well?”
I kissed her again, putting my whole self into it, like some ham who’d understudied John Barrymore.
“You go ahead,” I said when, after a while, we came up for air. “I’ll be there shortly. I have a little reading to do first. Some papers the president gave me.”
Her body stiffened in my arms and she seemed about to make another cutting remark. Then she checked herself.
“Don’t get the idea that you can use that excuse more than once,” she said. “I’m as patriotic as the next person. But I’m a woman, too.”
I nodded and kissed her again. “That’s the bit about you I like most of all.”
Diana pushed me away gently and grinned. “All right. Just don’t be too long. And if I’m asleep, see if you can use that giant brain of yours to figure out a way to wake me up.”
“I’ll try to think of something, Princess Aurora.”
I watched her go upstairs. She was worth watching. Her legs seemed designed to sell tickets at the Corcoran. I watched them to the tops of her stockings and then well beyond. For purely philosophical reasons, of course. All philosophers, Nietzsche said, have little understanding of women. But, then, he never watched Diana walk up a flight of stairs. I didn’t know a way of understanding ultimate reality that came close to observing the lacy, veined phenomenon that was Diana’s underwear.
Trying to shake this particular natural knowledge from my mind, I made myself a pot of coffee, found a new packet of cigarettes on the desk in my study, and sat down to look through the files given to me by Roosevelt.
The report compiled by the German War Crimes Bureau contained the most detail. But it was the British report, written by Sir Owen O’Malley, ambassador to the Polish government in exile, and prepared with the help of the Polish army, that detained me the longest. O’Malley’s exhaustive report was vividly written and included gruesome descriptions of how officers and men of the Soviet NKVD had shot the 4,500 men—in the back of the head, some with their hands tied, some with sawdust stuffed into their mouths to prevent them from crying out—before burying them in a mass grave.
Finishing the report a little after midnight, I found it impossible not to agree with O’Malley’s conclusion that, beyond any shadow of a doubt, the Soviets were guilty. O’Malley’s warning to Winston Churchill that the murders in the Katyn Forest would have long-lasting “moral repercussions” seemed understated. But following my talk with the president, I reckoned that any conclusions I formed from my own investigations would have to take second place to a perception I had already formed of the president’s desire for more cordial relations between himself and the murderous, Pole-hating Joseph Stalin.
Any report on the massacre that I myself compiled could be nothing more than a formality, a way for Roosevelt to cover his ass. I might even have viewed my presidential commission as something of a bore had it not been for the fact that I had managed to talk myself into a trip to London. London would be fun, and after months of inaction in one of the four redbrick buildings that comprised the “Campus”—the local nickname for the OSS and its predominantly academic staff—I was desperate for some excitement. A week in London might be just what the doctor ordered, especially now that Diana had started to make digs about my staying out of the line of fire.
I got up and went to the window. Looking out at the street, I tried to imagine all those murdered Polish officers lying in a mass grave somewhere near Smolensk. I drained the last of the whiskey from my glass. In the moonlight the lawn in front of my house was the color of blood and the restless silver sky had a spectral look, as if death itself had its great white whale of an eye upon me. Not that it mattered much who killed you. The Germans or the Russians, the British or the Americans, your own side or the enemy. Once you were dead you were dead, and nothing, not even a presidential inquiry, could change that fact. But I was one of the lucky ones, and upstairs, life’s affirmative act beckoned my attendance.
I switched off the lights and went to find Diana.
II
SUNDAY, OCTOBER 3, 1943,
BERLIN
STANDING UP, Joachim von Ribbentrop, the German foreign minister, came around his huge marble-topped desk and crossed the thickly carpeted room to face the two men seated on an ornate Biedermeier salon set upholstered in striped green-and-white silk. On the table in front of them lay a pile of curling photographs, each the size of a magazine, each the facsimile of a document that had been removed, covertly, from the safe of the British ambassador in Ankara, Sir Hughe Knatchbull-Hugessen. Von Ribbentrop sat down, and, trying to ignore the stalactite of rainwater dripping off the Maria Theresa crystal chandelier and collecting, noisily, in a metal bucket, he studied each picture, and then the swarthy-looking thug who had brought them to Berlin, with a show of weary disdain.
“It all looks too good to be true,” he said.
“That is, of course, possible, Herr Reichsminister.”
“People don’t suddenly become spies, for no good reason, Herr Moyzisch,” said von Ribbentrop. “Especially the valets of English gentlemen.”
“Bazna wanted money.”
“And it sounds as if he has had it. How much did you say that Schellenberg has given him?”
“Twenty thousand pounds, so far.”
Von Ribbentrop tossed the photographs back onto the table and one of them slipped to the floor. It was retrieved by Rudolf Linkus, his closest associate in the Foreign Ministry.
“And who trained him to use a camera with such apparent expertise?” said von Ribbentrop. “The British? Has it occurred to you that this might be disinformation?”
Ludwig Moyzisch endured the Reichsminister’s cold stare, wishing he were back in Ankara, and wondering why, of all the people who had examined these documents provided by his agent Bazna (code-named Cicero), von Ribbentrop was the only one to doubt their authenticity. Even Kaltenbrunner, the chief of the Reich Security Service and Walter Schellenberg’s boss, had been convinced the information was accurate. Thinking to make the case for Cicero’s material, Moyzisch said that Kaltenbrunner himself now held the opinion that the documents were probably genuine.
“Kaltenbrunner is ill, is he not?” Von Ribbentrop’s contempt for the SD chief was well known inside the Foreign Ministry. “Phlebitis, I heard. Doubtless his mind, what there is of it, has been much affected by his condition. Besides, I yield to no man, least of all a drunken, sadistic moron, in my knowledge of the British. When I was German ambassador to the Court of St. James, I got to know some of them quite well, and I tell you that this is a trick dreamt up by the English spymasters. Disinformation calculated to divert our so-called intelligence service from their proper tasks.” With one of his watery blue eyes half-closed, he faced his subordinate.
Ludwig Moyzisch nodded with what he hoped looked like proper deference. As the SD’s man in Ankara, he reported to General Schellenberg; but his position was complicated by the fact that his cover as the German commercial attaché to Turkey meant that he also answered to von Ribbentrop. Which was how he found himself justifying Cicero’s work to both the SD and the Reich Foreign Ministry. It was a situation that was enough to make any man nervous, since von Ribbentrop was no less vindictive than Ernst Kaltenbrunner. Von Ribbentrop may have looked weak and artificial, but Moyzisch knew it would be a mistake to underestimate him. The days of von Ribbentrop’s diplomatic triumphs might be behind him, but he was still a general in the SS and a friend of Himmler’s.