Hitler's Peace

by Philip Kerr

  Stalin was not staying in the main building of the recently redecorated embassy but in one of the several smaller cottages and villas that were on the grounds of what had once been the sumptuous estate of a rich Persian businessman. Until the Big Three Conference, many of these villas and cottages had been empty, and for the last two weeks, Zoya Zarubina, the stepdaughter of NKVD general Leonid Eitingen, had been scouring the local shops for carpets and furniture. New bathrooms had been installed and, unusually perhaps, in one of the villas, a portrait of Lenin had been replaced with one of Beethoven. No less peculiar, in Melamed’s view, had been the decision to refurbish a large underground bunker and to drain and paint a series of secret tunnels that connected the main building with several of the villas; after all, Teheran was protected by as many as a dozen squadrons of Russian and British fighter aircraft, and any air attack of the kind countenanced by the SS general who had sent in the teams of German parachutists would have been suicide. Melamed thought there was less likelihood of Stalin needing to seek the refuge of a bomb shelter while he was in Teheran than there was of Beria requiring the pastoral care of a Russian Orthodox priest.

  By late afternoon, several more of the SS parachutists had been arrested. By Melamed’s final account, this left three men, two of them German, still unaccounted for. As night fell, Melamed was informed about the arrival (under cover of darkness) of some early guests at Gale Morghe Airfield that very same evening, but was given no information as to who they were. These guests had been received by Beria, personally, and then, amid great secrecy, had been taken not to the British or to the American embassy but to the grounds of the Russian embassy itself. All of which prompted Melamed to wonder just who it was in the Kremlin that could have been accorded the same level of importance and security as Comrade Stalin himself. Molotov? Stalin’s daughter, Svetlana? His son, Vasily? Stalin’s mistress, perhaps?

  But perhaps the strangest of all Melamed’s discoveries that day came just before midnight, when, mindful of Beria’s threats to have him shot, he took a walk around the winter embassy grounds and found, to his astonishment, that one of the NKVD officers patrolling near the gates, with a Degtyarev submachine gun cradled in his arm, was Lavrenti Beria himself.

  XXIV

  SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 27, 1943,

  CAIRO

  I SPENT THREE uncomfortable nights in a cell beneath the police station in Cairo’s Citadel. No lack of precedents for a philosopher spending time in prison: Zeno, Socrates, Roger Bacon, Hugo Grotius, and Dick Tracy’s brother, Destutt. None of them had been accused of murder, of course. Not even Aristotle, of whom Bacon had remarked, jokingly, that, like an Eastern despot, he had strangled his rivals in order to reign peaceably.

  Philosophers’ jokes are always a real belly laugh.

  Missing the chance to see the city of Teheran gave me little cause for regret. Everything I had heard about the place—the water, the pro-Nazi Iranians, the haughty colonialism inflicted on the country by the British and the Russians—made me glad I wouldn’t be going there. All I wanted now was to clear myself of the murder charge and return to Washington. Once there, I was going to quit the OSS, sell the house in Kalorama Heights, and return to Harvard or Princeton. Whichever would have me. I would write another book. Truth looked like a subject that might be interesting. Provided I could decide exactly what truth was. I thought I might even write another letter to Diana, something much more difficult than writing a book about Truth.

  Early on the morning of the fourth day of my holiday in the Citadel I awoke to find Mike Reilly in my prison cell. Even in his tropical cream suit, he was hardly anyone’s idea of the Lord’s angel.

  “Did the maid let you in?” I shook my head, groggy with sleep. “What time is it?”

  “Time to get up,” Reilly said quietly and handed me a cup of coffee. “Here. Drink this.”

  “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.
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  “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 have a German spy traveling in our delegation. A man who has now killed twice. Possibly more. I firmly believe that one of our party intends to assassinate Joseph Stalin.”

  Hopkins listened patiently and then nodded. “Professor, I just know you’re wrong. And you’ll have to take my word for why that is, I’m afraid. I can’t tell you why. Not yet. But I happen to know that what you say is just impossible. When we’re on the ground, we can talk about this again. Until then, it might be a good idea if you were just to can this theory of yours. Got that?”

  We flew over Jerusalem and Baghdad, crossing the Tigris, up and along the Basra-Teheran railroad, and then from Ramadan to Teheran, always at only five or six thousand feet off the ground so that the lame constitutions of Roosevelt and Hopkins would not be taxed too much by the journey. All the same, I guessed it was quite a job for the pilot, having to negotiate several mountain passes instead of just flying the big C-54 over them.

  It was three o’clock in the afternoon when finally we caught sight of the Russian army airfield at Gale Morghe. Dozens of American B-25s repainted with the red star of the Soviet Union sat on the airfield.

  “Jesus Christ, that’s a terrifying sight,” joked Roosevelt. “Our own planes in Russian livery. I guess that’s what it will look like if the Commies ever conquer the States, eh, Mike?”

  “Painting them is one thing,” said Reilly. “Flying them’s another. The last time I was in this lousy country I learned that to fly with a Russian pilot and live is to lose all fear of death.”

  “Mike, I thought you knew,” laughed Roosevelt. “My security exists in inverse proportion to your own insecurity.”

  The presidential plane began to make its turn for a landing, banking over a checkerboard of rice fields and banks of puddle mud.

  A military escort commanded by General Connolly conveyed Roosevelt and his immediate party to the American legation in the north of the city. I went with the Joint Chiefs, Harriman, Bohlen, and some of the Secret Service to our quarters at Camp Amirabad.

  Amirabad was a U.S. Army facility that was still in the process of being built, and it already had a brick barracks, a hospital, a movie theater, some shops, offices, warehouses, and recreational facilities. It looked like any army base in New Mexico or Arizona, and seemed to indicate that the American presence in Teheran was hardly temporary.

  As soon as the Joint Chiefs, Bohlen, and I had changed our clothes, we were driven through the streets of Teheran in a convoy of jeeps, cars, and motorcycles to the American legation, where, on the verandah, Secret Service agents Qualter and Rauff were already on guard. I nodded to the agents, and much to my surprise they nodded back.

  “Have you got a cigarette?” I asked Qualter. “I seem to have left mine somewhere.”

  “Prison, by any chance?” said Qualter, and, smiling wryly, he took out a packet of Kools and tapped one out for me. “Do you mind mentholated?”

  “Nope,” I said, quietly noting the brand. “You don’t actually think I killed that woman, do you?”

  I didn’t really care what he thought, but I wanted to keep him talking. I was more interested in the discovery that he was smoking Kools.

  Qualter lit my cigarette and shrugged. “Not my place to think anything that doesn’t affect the safety of the boss. Hell, I dunno, Professor. You sure don’t look like a murderer, I’ll say that much for you. But, then, you don’t look like a secret agent, either.”

  “I’ll take that as a compliment.” I glanced down the front of Qualter’s single-breasted jacket, counting the buttons. There were three, just as there were supposed to be. “Anyway, thanks for the cigarette.”

  “That’s okay.” Qualter grinned. “They ain’t mine.”

  “Oh? Whose are they?”

  But Qualter had already turned away to open the door for the Joint Chiefs. I followed them inside, walking up a wooden ramp that had been built by army carpenters to facilitate Roosevelt’s entry and exit. It seemed the ramp had also presented the American delegation with a problem. Settled in the drawing room, the president was asking for a drink and Ambassador Dreyfus had to explain that the ram
p had been built on top of the only entrance to the legation’s wine cellar. He had been obliged to borrow eight bottles of scotch from the British ambassador, Sir Reader Bullard. Reilly heard Dreyfus out politely, then steered the ambassador to the door.

  “Jesus,” remarked Roosevelt when Dreyfus had gone. “Forget the scotch, what about the gin? And the vermouth? Mike? How am I going to mix a goddamned martini without any gin and vermouth?”

  Reilly nodded at Pawlikowski, who left the room, presumably in search of some gin and vermouth.

  “Take a seat, gentlemen,” said Hopkins.

  I sat down beside Chip Bohlen, facing the president, Hopkins, Admirals King and Leahy, and Ambassador Harriman. I hadn’t seen much of Harriman up close. He was tall, with a prominent jaw and the kind of smile lines that put you in mind of a clown without makeup. He had dark hair, with big furry eyebrows that anchored a forehead as high as Grand Central Station. His father had been a robber baron, one of the big railway magnates, and I supposed he was even richer than my mother. He looked a little how I was feeling, which was nervous.

  Seeing that Roosevelt was still talking to Harriman and King, I leaned toward Bohlen and said: “Since most of the interpreting is going to be done by you, it had better be you that reminds the president of any system you want to get going.”

  “System?” Bohlen frowned and shook his head. “Hell, there’s not even a stenographer. And as far as I can see, no one seems to have prepared any position papers on questions that might be discussed. Certainly none that I’ve seen. Doesn’t that strike you as a little bit strange?”

  “Come to think of it, yes. But that’s FDR. He likes to improvise. Keep things informal.”