Hitler's Peace

by Philip Kerr

  While Philby and I had remained in Vienna, Otto Deutsch, a Ph.D. working for the sexologist Wilhelm Reich, not to mention the NKVD, had made several attempts to recruit the two of us to the Russian Secret Service. It was an invitation I had resisted at the time. I didn’t know about Philby himself, who had returned to England with Litzi in May 1934, so that she might escape the clutches of the Heimwehr, for she had been more openly active than Kim. I had always assumed that, like myself, Philby had resisted Deutsch’s invitation to join the NKVD in Vienna. But seeing him again, working for the SIS in the Russian counterintelligence section and apparently nervous at the renewal of our acquaintance, made me wonder.

  Of course I could say nothing about this without drawing attention to my own background. Not that I thought it really mattered very much. If the British were, as was generally supposed by the OSS, breaking the German codes and not passing on relevant information to the Russians for fear of being asked to share all decoded German material, then, doubtless, Philby would see it as his duty to remedy such perfidious behavior toward an ally. I might even have applauded such so-called treachery. I would not have done it myself, but I might almost have approved of it being done by someone else.

  Back in my hotel room, I made some notes for my Katyn report, had another tepid bath, and put on a tuxedo. By six-thirty I was in the bar at the Ritz ordering a second martini even as I was finishing my first. Saying the right thing, saying a lot less than people wanted to know, saying not very much at all, just listening—it had been a long day, and I was desperate to relax. Rosamond was just the woman to pull out the pins.

  I had not seen her since the war began, and I was a little surprised that her once brown wavy hair was now gray, with a blue rinse; and yet she had lost none of her voluptuous allure. She kissed and hugged me.

  “Darling,” she cooed, in her soft, breathy voice. “How wonderful to see you.”

  “You’re still as gorgeous as you always were.”

  “It’s very sweet of you, Will, but I’m not.” She touched her hair self-consciously.

  I judged her to be in her early forties by now, but more beautiful than ever. She always reminded me a little of Vivien Leigh, only more womanly and sensuous. Less impetuous and much more thoughtful. Tall, pale-skinned, with a magnificent figure that belonged on a chaise longue in some artist’s studio, she wore a long, silvery skirt and a purple chiffon blouse that outlined her full figure.

  “I brought you some stockings,” I told her. “Gold Stripe. Only I’m afraid I left them in my room at Claridge’s.”

  “On purpose, of course. To make sure I’d come back to your hotel.”

  Ros was used to men throwing themselves at her feet, and she almost expected it as the price of being so beautiful, even as she did her best to play that down. This was an almost impossible task; most of the time, and wherever she was, Ros always stood out like a woman wearing a Balenciaga cocktail dress to a Sunday school picnic in Nebraska.

  “Of course.” I grinned.

  She fingered the string of pearls around her creamy white neck as I ordered a bottle of champagne.

  I offered her a cigarette and she squeezed it into a little black holder.

  “You’re living with a poet these days, is that right?” I leaned forward to light her cigarette and caught a whiff of some perfume that reached right down into my trouser pocket, and then some.

  “That’s right,” she puffed. “He’s gone off to visit his wife and children.”

  “Is he any good? As a poet, I mean?”

  “Oh, yes. And terribly good-looking, too. Just like you, darling. Only I don’t want to talk about him, because I’m cross with him.”

  “Why?”

  “Because he’s gone off to visit his wife and children instead of staying here in London with me, of course.”

  “Of course. But what happened to Wogan?”

  Wogan Philipps, the Second Baron Milford, was the husband Ros had left to be with her poet.

  “He’s getting married again. To a fellow Communist. At least he is as soon as I’ve divorced him.”

  “I didn’t know Wogan was a Communist.”

  “My dear, he’s positively riddled with it.”

  “But you’re not a Communist, are you?”

  “Lord, no. I am not and never have been a political animal. Romantically inclined toward the left, but not actively. And I expect men to make me their abiding cause, not Hitler or Stalin. Just as I have made men mine.”

  “Then here’s to you, sweetheart,” I said. “You get my vote, every time.”

  After a flirtatious dinner, we walked around the corner to St. James’s Place, where Victor Rothschild had a top-floor flat. A servant gave us a message that His Lordship had gone to a drinks party in Chesterfield Gardens and we should join him there.

  “Shall we go?” I asked Rosamond.

  “Why not? It beats going home to an empty flat in Kensington. And it’s been simply ages since I went to a party.”

  Tomas Harris and his wife, Hilda, were a wealthy couple whose hospitality was exceeded only by their self-evident good taste. Harris was an art dealer, and many of the walls of the house in Chesterfield Gardens displayed paintings and drawings by the likes of El Greco and Goya.

  “You must be Victor’s American,” he said, greeting me warmly. “And you must be Lady Milford. I’ve read all of your novels. Dusty Answer is one of my favorite books.”

  “I’ve just finished reading Invitation to the Waltz,” said Hilda Harris. “I was so excited when Tom told me you might be coming. Come on, let me introduce you to some people.” She took Rosamond by the elbow. “Do you know Guy Burgess?”

  “Yes. Is he here?”

  “Willard!”

  A dark-haired and stocky but handsome man came over and greeted me, exuding an air that was part rabbinical, part tycoon, part Bolshevik, and part aristocrat. Victor Rothschild was a prophet crying in a wilderness of privilege and position. We shared a love of jazz and a mutually rosy view of science, which was easier for Victor, given that he was actually a scientist. Victor couldn’t have made himself more scientific if he’d slept on a Petri dish.

  “Willard, good to see you,” he said, shaking my hand furiously. “Tell me, you didn’t bring your saxophone, did you? Will plays a pretty mean sax, Tom.”

  “I didn’t think it was appropriate,” I said. “When you’re the president’s special envoy, traveling with a saxophone is a little like bringing your pool cue to an audience with the Pope.”

  “President’s special envoy, eh? That is impressive.”

  “I think it sounds more impressive than it is. And what about you, Victor? What are you up to?”

  “MI5. I run a little antisabotage outfit, X-raying Winston’s cigars, that kind of thing. Technical stuff.” Rothschild wagged his finger at me. “Introduce him to someone, Tom. I’ll be back in ten minutes.”

  Watching Rothschild disappear out the drawing room door, Harris said, “He’s too modest by half. From what I hear he’s involved in bomb disposal. Tackling the latest German fuses and detonators. It’s dangerous work.” Glancing over my shoulder, Harris waved a tall, rather limp-looking man of the lean and hungry kind over toward us. “Tony, this is Willard Mayer. Willard, this is Anthony Blunt.”

  The man who came over had hands that more properly belonged on a delicate girl and the sort of fastidious, well-bred mouth that looked as if he’d been weaned on lemons and limes. He had an odd way of speaking that I didn’t like.

  “Oh, yes,” said Blunt, “Kim’s been telling me all about you.” He pronounced the last word with an indecent amount of emphasis, as if affecting a kind of disapproval.

  “Will?”

  I turned to find Kim Philby standing behind me.

  “Fancy that. I was just talking about you, Will.”

  “Be my guest. I’m fully insured.”

  “He’s a friend of Victor’s,” Harris told Philby, moving away to greet yet another guest.

&nbs
p; “Listen,” said Philby, “thanks awfully for not dropping me in it this afternoon. For not mentioning exactly what we got up to in Vienna.”

  “I couldn’t very well have done that. Not without dropping myself in it, too. Besides”—I flicked a match against my thumbnail and lit a cigarette—“Vienna was more than ten years ago. Things are different now. Russia is our ally, for a start.”

  “True,” said Philby. “Although there are times when you wouldn’t think so, the way we run this war.”

  “Speak for yourself. I’m not running anything except the length and breadth of the odd tennis court. Pretty much I do what I’m told.”

  “What I meant was that sometimes, when you look at the Red Army’s casualties, it seems as if the Soviet Union is the only country fighting Germany. But for the existence of the eastern front, the very idea of the British and the Americans being able to mount a landing in Europe would seem preposterous.”

  “I was speaking to some guy in my hotel who told me that there were just five people killed in Britain during the whole of September. Can that really be true? Or was he just trying to convince me that I could leave my umbrella at home?”

  “Oh, yes,” said Philby, “that’s perfectly true. And meanwhile the Russians are dying at a rate of something like seventy thousand a month. I’ve seen intelligence reports that estimate total Russian casualties at over two million. So you can see why they’re so worried that we’ll negotiate a separate peace and they’ll end up fighting Hitler on their own. It’s a fear that will hardly be assuaged by the knowledge that your president is now scrutinizing those murders in the Katyn Forest.”

  “I believe it’s still common practice for murder to be scrutinized,” I said. “It’s one of the things that helps to give us the illusion that we’re living in a civilized world.”

  “Oh, surely. But Stalin could hardly be blamed if he suspects that the Western allies might use Katyn as an excuse to postpone an invasion of Europe, at least until the Wehrmacht and the Red Army have destroyed each other.”

  “You seem to know a lot about what Stalin suspects, Kim.”

  Philby shook his head. “Intelligent guesswork. That’s what this lark is all about. Thing about the Russians is, they’re not hard to second-guess. Unlike Churchill. There’s no telling what’s going on in that man’s devious mind.”

  “From what I gather, Churchill hasn’t paid much attention to Katyn. He doesn’t behave like a man who’s preparing to use it as an excuse to postpone a second front.”

  “Perhaps not,” admitted Blunt. “But there are plenty of others who would, you know? The Jew-hating brigade who think we’re at war with the wrong enemy.” He grabbed a glass off a passing tray and swallowed the contents in one greedy parabola. “What about Roosevelt? Do you think he would countenance it?”

  Blunt smiled warmly, but I still didn’t like his mouth.

  Catching my frown, Philby said, “It’s all right, Willard. Anthony is one of us.”

  “And what might that be?” I said, bristling. The proposition that Anthony Blunt was “one of us” seemed almost as offensive to me as its corollary, that I might be one of them.

  “MI5. In fact, Anthony might be just the man you need to speak to about your Polish thing. The Allied governments in exile, neutral countries with diplomatic missions in London, Anthony keeps an eye on all of them, don’t you, Tony?”

  “If you say so, Kim,” smiled Blunt.

  “Well, it’s no great secret,” grumbled Philby.

  “I can tell you this,” said Blunt. “The Poles would dearly like to get their hands on a Russian who’s an attaché at the Soviet embassy in Washington. Fellow named Vasily Zubilin. In 1940 he was a major in the People’s Commissariat on Internal Affairs and commanded one of the execution battalions at Katyn. It seems that the Russians sent him to Washington as a reward for a good job. And to get him out of the neighborhood. And because they know he’s never likely to defect. If he did, they’d simply tell your government what he did at Katyn. And then some Pole would very likely want to have him charged as a war criminal. Whatever that is.

  “So, how do you know Victor?” Blunt asked abruptly, changing the subject.

  “We share a similarly perfunctory attitude to our Jewishness,” I said. “Or, in my case, and to be more accurate, my half-Jewishness. I went to his wedding to Barbara. And you?”

  “Oh. Cambridge,” said Blunt. “And Rosamond. You came with her, didn’t you? How do you know Rosie?”

  “Do stop interrogating him, Anthony,” said Philby.

  “It’s all right,” I said, although I didn’t answer Blunt’s question and, hearing Rosamond’s distinctive laugh, I glanced around and saw her listening with much amusement as a disheveled figure held forth loudly about some boy he was trying to seduce. I was beginning to suspect that almost everyone invited to the party had been to Cambridge and was either a spy, a Communist, or a homosexual—in Anthony Blunt’s case very probably all three.

  Rothschild came back into the room carrying a saxophone triumphantly aloft.

  “Victor.” I laughed. “I think you’re very probably the only man I know who could track down a spare saxophone at eleven o’clock at night.” I took the sax from my old friend, who sat down at the piano, lit a cigarette, then lifted the lid.

  We played for more than half an hour. Rothschild was the better musician, but it was late and people were too drunk to notice my technical shortcomings. After we had finished, Philby drew me aside.

  “Very good,” he said. “Very good indeed. That was quite a duo.”

  I shrugged and drank a glass of champagne to moisten my mouth.

  “You remember Otto Deutsch, of course?” he said.

  “Otto? Yes. What ever happened to him? He came to London, didn’t he? After Austria went Fascist.”

  “He was on a ship that was sunk in the mid-Atlantic by a German submarine.” Philby paused and lit a cigarette.

  “Poor Otto. I didn’t know.”

  “He tried to recruit me, you know. To the NKVD, back in Vienna.”

  “Really?”

  “I couldn’t see the point, quite frankly. I think I would have worked for them if I’d stayed on in Austria. But for Litzi’s sake I had to leave. So I came back here, got a job on the Times. But I saw Otto again, in 1937, when he was on his way to Russia. I think he was rather lucky not to get shot in the Great Purge. Anyway, he tried to recruit me here in London, would you believe? God knows why. I mean, any information a journalist gets, he tends to pass on to his readers. I was a Communist, of course. Still am, if the truth be known, which, if it was, I’d be out of the service on my ear.”

  “Why are you telling me this, Kim?”

  “Because I think I can trust you, old boy. And what you were saying earlier. About the idea of our side in this war negotiating a peace with Jerry.”

  I didn’t recall saying anything much about that, but I let it go.

  “I think if I ever did find out something like that, then secrecy be damned. I’d march straight round to the Soviet embassy and shove a note through the bloody letterbox. Dear Comrade Stalin, The British and Americans are selling you down the Volga. Yours sincerely, Kim Philby, MI5.”

  “I don’t think that’s going to happen.”

  “No? Ever hear of a chap called George Earle?”

  “Yes. As a matter of fact he’s one of the reasons I’m here. Earle’s the president’s special representative in the Balkans. He wrote an unsolicited report for FDR about the Katyn Forest massacre. He’s a pal of Roosevelt’s. Rich. Very rich. Like the rest of Roosevelt’s pals.”

  “You included,” chuckled Philby.

  “That’s my family you’re talking about, Kim. Not me.”

  “Lord, now you sound just like Victor.” He laughed. “The epicurean ascetic.” Philby grabbed another glass of champagne.

  I grabbed one myself and sipped it slowly this time. I wanted to cool down and stop myself from punching Philby. I excused him because he
was drunk. And because I wanted to hear more about George Earle.

  “Listen,” he said, with the air of someone who couldn’t make up his mind if he was offering up gossip or a state secret. It seemed quite possible that he didn’t know the difference. “The Earle family made its money in the sugar trade. Earle dropped out of Harvard, and in 1916 he joined General Pershing’s army, trying to hunt down Pancho Villa in Mexico. Then he joined the U.S. Navy and won the Navy Cross, which is how he’s so thick with Roosevelt. FDR’s a big navy man, right?”

  I nodded. “Where are you going with this, Kim?”

  Philby tapped the side of his nose. “You’ll see.” He lit another cigarette and then snatched it from his mouth impatiently.

  “A lifelong Republican, Earle nevertheless supported Roosevelt for president in 1932. And as a reward, FDR made him his naval attaché in Ankara. Now, then. Here comes the good part. Hefty—that’s our chum Earle’s nickname—has a girlfriend, a Belgian dancer and part-time prostitute named Hélène, who works for us. I’m telling you all this so you’ll know where some of our information is coming from.

  “In May of this year, Hefty met the German ambassador in Ankara. As I’m sure you are aware, the ambassador is also the former German chancellor, Franz von Papen. According to Hélène, Hefty and von Papen conducted some secret peace negotiations. We’re not quite sure if the talks were initiated by Earle or by von Papen. Either way, Earle reported back to FDR and von Papen reported back to someone in Berlin—we’re not exactly sure to whom. Nothing much seemed to happen for a while. Then, just a few days ago, Earle had a meeting with an American by the name of Theodor Morde. Ever hear of him?”

  “I’ve never heard of Theodor Morde,” I said, truthfully.

  “Morde’s a chap who used to work for COI in Cairo before it turned into your mob, the OSS. I thought you might know him.”