by Philip Kerr
The lieutenant pointed to the largest piece of equipment in the room, a black box measuring almost six feet high and two and a half feet wide, and on which a small sign was attached that said PLEASE DO NOT TOUCH.
“This,” said Cubitt, “is the TBL. A low-frequency, high-frequency transmitter. It’s used exclusively to provide ship-to-ship communications.” He frowned. “That’s odd.”
“What is?”
“It’s switched on.”
“Is that unusual?”
“Yes. We’re supposed to be observing radio silence. If we wanted to contact the destroyer escort in an emergency we’d use the TBS. That’s Talk Between Ships.” He touched the TBL. “It’s warm, too. It must have been on all night.” Cubitt looked at the other three men in the room. “Anyone know why this is switched on?”
The three radio seamen, including Norton, shook their heads.
I stared closely at the Westinghouse-made TBL. “Lieutenant, what band is this on?”
Cubitt leaned in close to check the dial, and I caught the smell of something nice on his hair. It made a pleasant change from sweat and body odor.
“Six hundred meters, sir. That’s what it should be on. All our coastal defenses use the six-hundred-meter band.”
“How hard would it be to retune this to another waveband?” I asked no one in particular.
“All of this stuff is a bitch to retune,” said Radio Seaman Norton, who seemed to have woken up to the fact that I was on his side. “That’s why we got the sign.”
“Pity,” I said.
“How’s that?” asked Cubitt.
“Only that it makes my theory a little harder to sustain.”
“And what theory is that, sir?”
I grinned and looked around for an ashtray. Norton grabbed one and held it in front of me. It wasn’t so much of a theory as a strong possibility. Probably I should have kept this to myself, but I wanted to help the boy they’d accused of neglecting his duty.
“That we have a German spy aboard this ship.” I shrugged off their loud guffaws. But Norton wasn’t laughing. “You see, the destroyer escort didn’t intercept a signal being broadcast from a U-boat but from the Iowa itself. A broadcast being made by the same person who lured Seaman Norton off to the radar room. It takes about twelve minutes to go there and come back here.”
“Longer in the dark, sir,” Norton added helpfully. “You kind of have to watch your footing on those stairs at night. Especially in a sea like last night.”
“Then call it fifteen minutes. More than enough time to broadcast a short message, I’d have thought.”
“But to what?” asked Cubitt. “A U-boat?”
“There’s nothing to stop the krauts tuning in to that six-hundred-meter waveband, sir,” offered one of the other radio seamen. “The U-boats used to do that a lot when we first got into the war, before we cottoned on to the fact that they were doing it and started to send our signals in code. They sank an awful lot of shipping that way.”
“So if a German spy did send a signal from here on the six-hundred-meter waveband,” I said, “the signal could have been picked up anywhere between here and the United States. By another ship. By a German U-boat. By our coastal defenses. Possibly even by another German spy tuning in to the six-hundred-meter waveband in Washington, D.C.”
“Yes, sir,” said the seaman. “That’s about the size of it.”
There was a long silence as the men in the radio room faced up to the logic of what I had established.
“A German spy, huh?” sighed Cubitt. “The captain is going to love that.”
XVI
FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 19-
SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 20, 1943,
THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
THE ATMOSPHERE around Roosevelt grew a lot more tense—certainly among the members of his Secret Service detail—when my idea about a German spy aboard the Iowa became more generally known.
On one particular occasion, however, the defensive posture assumed by FDR’s bodyguards seemed to go beyond what was reasonable. The morning of the nineteenth, the Iowa sighted the fourth escort group; it comprised the light cruiser Brooklyn and five destroyers, two of them American and three British. While watching the new escort group through binoculars on the flag bridge, FDR’s cape blew off. A young seaman fetching the cape off the air-search antenna had climbed up to return it to the president, only to find himself wrestled to the deck by Agents Pawlikowski and Rowley, guns drawn and faces contorted with alarm.
“For Christ’s sake,” yelled Admiral King, “are you two guys too dumb to see that the boy was only fetching the president his cape?”
That was the moment when Captain McCrea turned on me. “This is all your fault,” he hissed at me. “I blame you and your loose talk about German spies for this.”
It was a nice sentiment. I went back to my cabin, filled a glass with scotch, stood in front of the mirror, and toasted myself silently. “Here’s to the satisfaction of being right,” I told myself.
After that I kept to my cabin, rereading the books I had brought and drinking up much of what remained of Ted Schmidt’s supply of Mount Vernon. I even wrote the letter of condolence to his widow, and then rewrote it when I was sober, editing out all the stuff about how his last words had been about her. But that didn’t make any difference. It still left me feeling depressed as hell. I couldn’t help but let my mind’s eye picture Debbie Schmidt reading it and then, in my romantic little scenario, flagellating herself over the way she had behaved toward him. A psychiatrist would probably have told me I had in fact written another letter to Diana.
The State Department would certainly have forwarded the letter to Mrs. Schmidt. But thinking to speed its journey home by writing Schmidt’s home address on the envelope, I searched his bag, looking for his address book, only to discover it was missing. For a brief stupid moment, I considered reporting the theft to the captain, and then rejected the idea. McCrea would hardly have thanked me for alleging that yet another crime had been committed aboard his precious battleship.
It was just my luck that whoever had stolen Ted Schmidt’s address book should have ignored Donovan’s Louis Vuitton suitcase containing all those Bride intercepts.
But who had taken the address book? After all, what good was a State Department employee’s address book in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean? It looked even less useful now that we were about to land in North Africa.
At 1800 hours the combined task group reached a point about twenty miles west of Cape Spartel, not far from Tangier. All the ships went to general quarters, for now we were in range of enemy attack from the air. The voyage was almost over.
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 Café 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 attachés, 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 & 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, Eisenhower, together with Hopkins and the rest of us, was accommodated in La Marsa, about twenty minutes outside the city center, in a beach-front French colonial house, a great wedding cake of a place with enormous and ornate blue doors.
The city of Tunis was bigger than I had imagined, and I thought it neither very Arab nor very African. Nor, for that matter, very French, either. After a short nap, I took a quick look at the famous souk and the mosque, and then sought out the Café M’Rabet, where I was to meet the OSS man in Tunis.
Ridgeway Poole had a Ph.D. in classical archaeology from Princeton and, already the author of one book on Hannibal and the Punic Wars, he had jumped at the chance of working for the
OSS just a few miles from Carthage. He had been stationed in Tunis for just three months, working under vice-consular cover, but he knew the area very well, having worked on an important prewar excavation of the Antonine thermal baths. Fluent in Arabic and French, he seemed entirely at home in the cool interior of the café, sitting on a little platform, shoes off, smoking a sweet-smelling water pipe and sipping Arab tea.
“Sit down,” he said. “Take off your shoes. Have some tea.” Poole waved a waiter toward us and ordered without waiting for me to agree. “Pity you’re not here very long,” he said.
“Yes, isn’t it?” I said, trying to conceal my lack of enthusiasm for the second large North African town I’d seen that day.
“Donovan’s reserved you a room at Shepheard’s Hotel, in Cairo, which, all being well, is where he will meet you for lunch tomorrow. Lucky you. I wouldn’t mind a weekend at Shepheard’s myself.”
“Have you any idea how long we’re going to be there?”
“Donovan said at least four or five days.”
“I’ve an old girlfriend in Cairo. I wonder if I might be able to send her a telegram.”
“No problem. I can fix that for you.”
“I’d also like to get a message back to Washington.”
“A girl in every port, eh?”
“Actually this is a message to the Campus. I was hoping that someone there might be able to check out the circumstances of a death.” I told Poole about Ted Schmidt’s disappearance and his wife’s death in a traffic accident.
“All right. I’ll see what I can organize. All part of the service. So, what are your plans? Care to make a night of it? I’d be happy to show you the ruins. Couple of clubs I know.”
“I’d like to, really. But there’s a dinner tonight at La Mersa. Harry Hopkins’s son and the two Roosevelt boys and their fathers. It seems I’m invited.”
“That blowhard Elliott’s been talking about nothing else these past few days. ‘Idiot Roosevelt’ we call him. He’s been fucking some British WAC while his wing has been stationed here. That’s okay to do if you’re a nobody like me, and I’ve certainly had my moments since I got here. But you can’t expect to get away with that kind of thing when your pa is the president of the United States and you’ve got a wife and three kids back home.”