The Murder of a Fifth Columnist Read online

  She shrugged.

  “—Peculiar, I guess. Nurse dropped it, or something. Anyway, it’s not here, and she never mentions it. Mrs. Wharton asked one day at a luncheon at the Sulgrave Club if she had any children. She looked so… oh, sort of stricken. Then she said, ‘Yes, I have one, who isn’t very well.’ I’ll bet she thought Effie’d gone back to the farm when she asked Sam here. So don’t start talking about your sons—not if you intend to be tactful.”

  As we started in I noticed that on either side of the door was a modernist glass console table with a pair of lovely lamps with the three royal feathers in glass sprouting above some kind of jade plastic shades. Sylvia stopped abruptly, reached out and picked up a handsome jewel-handled knife in an old tooled leather sheath.

  “This is what Larry fills up his space with,” she remarked, pulling it out. It was about ten inches long and sharp as a razor. She put the point against my ribs. It was like a needle. She laughed, put it back in its case again and put it down. “Nothing like being prepared for an emergency, I always say.—Oh, bless me, look at this.”

  She picked up a folded letter lying on the other side of the lamp. There was a familiar look about the heavy salmon-berry yellow paper.

  “She must belong to the better classes or she wouldn’t be getting this.”

  As she unfolded it I saw the heading “Truth Not Fiction.”

  “Oh,” I said. I recognized it then because I was on its mailing list too. It was a newsletter that arrived three days a week and had done so since the fifteenth of September, regular as the morning milk. I’d thought it was an election stunt until November 5th, but it kept on coming. It was sponsored privately, it said, by Thinking Americans. Who they were exactly it didn’t reveal, but they thought along pretty consistent lines. The general tenor of it was that the country had gone to the dogs completely—doom was just around the corner. The disquieting things about it, however, seemed to be the so-called straight-from-the-horse’s-mouth items about international friction in the Defense Program that gave you the feeling that democracy—as we know it—has about as much chance as frost in August. It harped constantly on the necessity for the mailed fist in the Orient and insisted that the United States walk in and take over Mexico. I couldn’t help starting to read it, but I’d never read it through, and I never read it at all the day my boys’ reports came. They were usually severe enough reminders that the youth of the nation was frittering itself away on non-essentials.

  I noticed the heading “Has Defense Bogged Down?” and glanced at Sylvia. There was an extraordinary expression on her face. She folded the letter quickly and put it back on the table.

  “Who writes that, do you know?” I asked.

  “I don’t,” she said quickly. Too quickly, I thought, and too abruptly. “Let’s go in.”

  She went on, instantly gay and charming and liquid as honey.

  “My dear—it was lovely of you to ask me!”

  She held out both her hands to her hostess as if they’d been friends for years and hadn’t seen each other for a month.

  “This is such a beautiful apartment—I didn’t think the Randolph-Lee had anything like it. It gives you a ray of hope for American interiors. Hello, Pete—how nice! I didn’t know you were going to be here. Corliss, you’re looking unbearably fit! How was South America? Don’t tell me—let me read it. Hullo, Larry darling. You were wonderful this morning. How do you find out so much. Is it really true that Madame Blank dropped her wig in the punch bowl?”

  She turned back to me. “You know Grace Latham, don’t you, Mrs. Sherwood.—Oh, sorry… how stupid of me. She wouldn’t be here if you weren’t friends.—Hello, Sam!”

  Then she was telling Congressman—or ex-Congressman—Sam Wharton how blind the country was in not returning leaders like him. I could hear her while I was shaking hands with Mrs. Addison Sherwood.

  Mrs. Sherwood wasn’t a beautiful woman, but she was a handsome one—about forty-five, I’d say, though she looked younger. Or would have if there hadn’t been something around her gray eyes that was deeper and more mature than her slim figure in a beautifully cut white gown would indicate. Her skin was warm and sun-tanned, and her hair had been light and was smartly cut and curled with no attempt to disguise the graying strands in it. She’d got up with a simple cordiality that would have made Sylvia’s Ruth Draper act look a little shoddy if Sylvia hadn’t herself been just as much to the manner born. She smiled at me.

  “I don’t know Grace Latham—but I’ve met her and liked her, and I wanted to know her.”

  I don’t think anyone else heard that, except possibly Larry Villiers, who could be in Omaha and hear what people were saying in Los Angeles if it was column.

  She took my arm. “You know everybody, don’t you? Mrs. Wharton and the Congressman?”

  Effie Wharton said, “Yes, I know Mrs. Latham,” rather as if it was my fault that I could go on living in Washington while she had to leave it shortly. The Congressman said, “Yes, indeed,” with a twinkle in his eye. He looked ten years younger than he had in October when he rushed back home to do a hurried and ineffectual job of political fence repairing.

  “And Mr. Hofmann?” Mrs. Sherwood said.

  “No,” I said. “But of course I’ve read Terror Unleashed.”

  The noted anti-Totalitarian, big and blond with a saber scar down his cheek, dropped his eyeglass and bowed from the waist. “I’m very glad, madame,” he said. Just a touch of foreign accent did something to his middle “r’s.”

  “I hope all Americans will read it and be warned in time—if indeed it is not already too late.”

  “I guess we’ll manage,” Sam Wharton drawled.

  Mrs. Sherwood interrupted, laughing. “Now, now—I’ve told you, Mr. Hofmann, that Mr. Wharton doesn’t believe there’s anything the United States can’t do when it puts its mind to it.”

  Kurt Hofmann bowed again.

  “I respect his opinion, madame, but I deplore the lack of insight that has enabled him to form it.”

  I could see the color seeping up around Sam Wharton’s ears.

  “We haven’t all had your opportunities, sir,” he said, with the suggestion of a bow himself.

  I went over to Corliss Marshall. If I couldn’t figure out why I had been asked to this party, I certainly couldn’t see why he had. Neither could he, apparently. He was looking at his watch as if his train was long overdue, and sort of shaking his withers. He kept his back to Pete Hamilton as well as he could, but it was hard to keep it to Pete and to Congressman Wharton at the same time—and while columnists are supposed to be able to attack the President and go cheerfully to the White House, I doubt if that holds all down the line. Furthermore, Corliss just couldn’t look at Sam Wharton without a glint of malicious triumph brightening his eyes. He’d been unbelievably bitter about Sam. He’d accused him of selling the country down the river, of making political capital out of the heart’s blood of small investors, and of practically every public crime in the index. All of which might be true—I wouldn’t know. But the day he devoted his entire column to what he called the Abe Lincoln ruse to slide towards the White House, I happened to meet Sam Wharton. A picture of him had come out in the papers with a group of men who’d met some dignitary. All had top hats but Mr. Wharton. He had an old gray felt in his hand.

  “I wasn’t trying to be Abe Lincoln,” he said to me. “I just feel like a fool in a top hat. I never owned one. Effie said I ought to buy one, but I’m damned if I will after this.”

  I’d always rather liked Sam Wharton after that. He was a bitter isolationist, but he’d been in Congress a long time and still believed in the democratic processes, and that’s more than Corliss Marshall did. And of the two of them now, Corliss Marshall, the suave and travelled and successful diner-out and molder of public opinion, was definitely showing himself less the man of the world. I had the feeling, standing there by him, that a fuse of some sort was already sputtering, and that any moment there’d be an explosion th
at would blast the Randolph-Lee and everything in it into Rock Creek Park.

  “I understood Bliss Thatcher was going to be here,” he said testily. “I wouldn’t have come otherwise.”

  I said, “Ssssh.” Mrs. Sherwood was coming over to us. And Corliss, rather politer than I would have expected him to be, said, “Where’s Colonel Primrose, Grace?”

  “He’s out of town, I believe,” I said. How the idea that I’m Colonel Primrose’s keeper has got so firmly planted in so many people’s minds is beyond me.

  “And I’m so sorry,” Mrs. Sherwood said. “I thought he’d enjoy meeting Mr. Hofmann. But perhaps we can arrange it when he comes back. And my dear, I don’t think you’ve met Senor Delvalle, have you?”

  I hadn’t but I’d been very much aware of a brilliant pair of black eyes in a dark-skinned pockmarked face following me about the room. I was a little surprised at the perfect Oxford English that accompanied a definitely warm and Latin kiss on the back of the hand I held out.

  “I have seen you before, Mrs. Latham,” Senor Delvalle said. “But I have not had the pleasure of meeting you.”

  I’d probably spilled something somewhere, I thought. I definitely wasn’t the type to attract a Latin’s attention in the usual crowded rooms around town.

  “I hope I shall also meet Colonel Primrose,” he said. “I have heard so much about him.”

  Larry Villiers uncrossed his legs and pulled his spine up a little out of the corner of the sofa to reach the ashtray. “You ought to make him go on the air, Grace,” he said languidly. “Think of the money he’d make, running some kind of round table of military opinion on defense.”

  I interrupted him a little sharply, I’m afraid. “I imagine Colonel Primrose thinks the officers on active duty are better-informed about defense than the retired personnel, Larry,” I said.

  “—Atta girl, Grace!”

  I turned abruptly. Pete Hamilton was at my elbow, grinning like a fiend, his sardonic hard-bitten mouth betrayed by a spattering of perennial freckles across his big nose, his too light and too shaggy eyebrows making him look a little like a Nordic chimpanzee, his black tie a little askew. Sylvia Peele certainly hadn’t fallen in love with him for his looks. He was tall and gangly, and as many seasons as I’ve seen him I’ve never seen him with a dinner coat on that had sleeves quite long enough.

  “Don’t let ’em use your influence, Grace,” he said, and even though he was still grinning there was a bedrock undertone that was apparent to everybody.

  It annoyed Corliss Marshall.

  “If Grace has that influence”—you could see that he for one doubted it—“she ought to use it,” he put in sharply. “It’s people like Primrose who know how obsolete our army is, and how it’s riddled with incompetents because of the retirement rules.”

  “On the contrary,” I retorted—and why I felt it my duty to uphold the Army, about which I know next to nothing, I’m not quite sure—“I think Colonel Primrose regards the Army as flexible and highly efficient.”

  “Then he’d be a fool!” Corliss Marshall snapped. “And he’s not. Look what the Army did to Billy Mitchell. Look at the situation now. We ought to have had the draft five years ago.”

  “Yes?” Pete said, a little dangerously. “And what have you done? Did you raise a storm when Billy Mitchell bit the dust? Wasn’t it you, Marshall, that said we didn’t need the draft? And didn’t you go to town on the disarmament conference and plump for scrapping the Navy? I won a prep school debate by learning a column of yours by heart once. And what are you scared of now? You’re too old to fight. What makes you figure the rest of us have lost our guts just because you’ve lost yours?”

  Corliss Marshall trembled with rage. “Because the safety of the country’s in the hands of white-livered puppies like you—and you!” he shouted. He pointed from Pete to Larry Villiers, who didn’t, I must admit, look as if he’d ever been much good defending anything but a very upper-class drawing room hearth.

  Pete’s mouth went a shade harder.

  “Be careful how inclusive you are, Marshall,” he said quietly.

  Larry Villiers, still slumping elegantly back in the corner of the sofa, had merely looked surprised when Corliss’s finger shot out at him. At this almost gratuitous insult from Pete, everything about him changed… but without his ever moving a muscle or varying the slow almost catlike movement of his hand as he raised his cigarette to his lips and let the smoke trickle slowly out of the corner of his mouth. I wouldn’t have wanted Larry Villiers to hate me like that, I thought.

  He flicked his cigarette into the fireplace and lighted another, saying nothing.

  It seemed to me that it was getting unpleasantly warm in the room, and there was a detached glint in the eyes of Señor Delvalle as he followed this argument that didn’t look very hopeful for hemispheric solidarity.

  “—Why don’t you let the War and Navy Departments take care of it?” I asked. “And tell me something that’s in your field. Who is it that writes ‘Truth Not Fiction’?”

  If cooling off the room had been my idea, it was certainly successful. It was just as if I’d dropped a Molotov breadbasket of dry ice squarely in the middle of it. The silence was deafening. The faces of the four newspaper men went completely frozen.

  Senor Delvalle looked at me with admiration.

  “I have often wondered that myself, Mrs. Latham,” he said.

  Nobody answered him either. It was the first time in my life that I’d seen Corliss Marshall, Pete Hamilton, Larry Villiers and Sylvia Peele—en masse or any one of them separately—silent on any subject.

  “I saw a copy of it today,” Kurt Hofmann said, apparently unaware that an unusual situation had developed. He let his monocle fall and slide down his starched shirt-front. “I applaud every effort of the press to keep America aroused. You are too soft. You stir yourselves every four years, and drop back to sleep again.”

  “What we need is a Strong Opposition,” Effie Wharton said sharply. She sounded exactly like the chorus in a Greek play.

  I could see what Sylvia meant all right. It wasn’t because she didn’t like the way the country was being run—it was because she and Sam weren’t helping run it any more.

  Kurt Hofmann glanced at her.

  “America is becoming a decadent nation,” he went on, as if he hadn’t been interrupted really. “Look what happened when an obscure infant-prodigy playwright broadcast a supposed attack from Mars. It is the duty of you gentlemen of the Press… and ladies”—he bowed to Sylvia sitting beside Larry, and put his glass back in his eye—“to hold constantly before your country the danger it is in by its failure to have adequate arms, and its lack of moral preparedness, and its class struggle, and the wastefulness of its government.”

  Sylvia was looking at him with her blank, almost childish stare. She glanced at me.

  “You ought even now to have blackouts in your great cities!” Kurt Hofmann exclaimed. “Prepare! Be ready!”

  “Oh, we couldn’t do that!” Sylvia said flatly. “We couldn’t have blackouts!”

  “Why not?”

  “Because!”

  Her voice couldn’t have been more innocent.

  “It would disrupt everything. It would stop all the electric clocks, and the refrigerators. I was an hour late to dinner the other night, because the current had gone off and nobody had set the clock.”

  An abrupt and I think I may say appalled silence for an instant galvanized, and then deflated, the whole group. All of them, that is, except Sam Wharton, Pete Hamilton and myself who knew her. I saw a sharp flicker of amusement that passed between the two men.

  In the silence that had all the varying qualities of the people who were part of it, Sylvia said, “Well, it would, I mean. Wouldn’t it?”

  Kurt Hofmann’s affirmative was all sibilants. “Yes!” he said. His voice was stinging with scorn. “It would, Miss Peele. I’m afraid it would. I’m afraid the refrigerators would be off a few hours. And America would be with
out its ice cubes.”

  The atmosphere was so charged with electricity that if a blackout could have isolated it I’m sure our hostess would have ordered one. She was sitting there, obviously distressed, her head bent forward a little, waiting to interrupt them. As she started to speak the butler came into the room with a telegram on a tray.

  “I hope that’s not from Bliss Thatcher,” Corliss said. He took his watch out of his pocket.

  Mrs. Sherwood smiled. “Perhaps I’d better read it at once, if you’ll forgive me,” she said. The rebuke, if that’s what it was intended to be, was lost on Corliss Marshall—accustomed to being rude if he liked and to never being rebuked.

  She tore open the envelope and glanced at the telegram.

  “It’s not from Mr. Thatcher,” she said, smiling. She folded it and put it in her pocket. I wouldn’t have guessed from the tone of her voice that there was anything important in that wire. I wasn’t watching her read it, but I was looking at Sylvia Peele who was watching her… and I saw something flicker behind her eyes before she looked away and started talking to Mrs. Wharton.

  “Mr. Thatcher said he would be a little late,” Mrs. Sherwood said. “He had to attend a meeting, so I put dinner back a little. He’s bringing Lady Alicia Wrenn. I knew you’d all want to wait for them. Perhaps I’d better call her and explain.”

  She got up.

  “Have you seen this apartment?” she said to me. “Do come and see my upstairs. Do you mind if I call you Grace?”

  It was a little surprising—not the Grace part so much as wandering off to look at her apartment with my cocktail scarcely touched. I got up nevertheless, of course.

  “I’d love to,” I said.

  Sylvia moved her feet for me to pass and looked up at me with blank expressionless eyes. Mr. Hofmann stood aside and bowed. I could feel Larry Villiers’ eyes following us out the door.