“What did you want to say to Professor Mayer?” asked Reilly.
“Only that he was right all along, Mike. And to apologize to him. For killing his girlfriend.”
“You killed that woman in Cairo? The princess?”
“Had to. She could have given me away. You understand, don’t you, Professor? I was there that afternoon when you came calling unexpectedly. I was up in the radio room when you arrived. Receiving a message from Berlin. When you showed up I had to wait until you and Elena were in bed before I could sneak out the back door. Which is why I forgot to burn the signal from Berlin. I remembered later. And came back in the small hours, to burn it. I figured you would be in bed with her again, and otherwise engaged. She was a great-looking broad. Nothing between us, though. Not that I would have minded, of course. But it was strictly professional. Anyway, I had just come in when I saw you up in the radio room. I stayed downstairs while you went back in her bedroom. And after you’d left the house, I went back in there and saw that you’d taken the signal.”
“But why didn’t you just kill me? Why kill her?”
Pawlikowski smiled thinly. The shadows under his eyes looked like the ash on the end of his cigarette and his lips were blue, as if the priest had been there slightly before me, with the communion wine.
“After all that heat you’d made about a German spy? No way. Killing one member of the president’s delegation was risky enough. But two? Besides, she would never have stood for it. She was fond of you, Professor. Very fond. So, I killed her, hid the radio, and made it look like you had done it. I’m sorry about that, Professor. Really I am. But I had no choice. Killing Hitler was more important than anything.”
“Yes, I see. But who put you up to this? Can you tell us who you were working for?”
“The Abwehr. Admiral Canaris. And some people in the Wehrmacht who don’t want the Allies to make a peace with Germany that leaves Hitler in power. They figured it might be easier killing him here than in Germany. That he wouldn’t be expecting it here. You see, back in Germany it gets more difficult each time they try.”
“But why you?”
“I’m a Polish-German Jew from Danzig, that’s why.” Pawlikowski took another drag off the cigarette. “That’s all the reason I needed.”
“Who recruited you, and where?”
Pawlikowski smiled. “I can’t tell you that.”
“But Thornton Cole was on to you, right? That’s why he was killed.”
“He wasn’t on to me. But he was on to my contact in Washington. That’s why he was killed. But I didn’t do it. Someone else did that.”
“But you did kill Ted Schmidt, aboard the USS Iowa, right?”
“He came to me with information that would have persuaded the police to take a closer look at Cole’s murder. It was a split-second thing. I guessed that if the Metro cops managed to find out who really did kill him, then they might find my contact. And that might put them on to me. That it might stop me from killing Hitler. So I hit him and threw the body overboard.”
“And on the Iowa, it was you who radioed your German friends back in the States, for the same reason.”
Pawlikowski nodded. “I love the boss,” he whispered. “I love him like he was my own dad. But he should never have tried to make peace with Hitler. You can’t make deals with someone like that. I’m sorry I killed those people. I didn’t like doing it. But I’d do it again, tomorrow, if it gave me another chance to kill Hitler.” He grabbed Reilly’s hand. “I’m sorry I let you down, Mike. And the boss, too. Tell him that for me, will you? But I did what I thought was right.”
“We all did, John. You, me, the professor here, and the president. We all did what we thought was right.”
“I guess so,” said Pawlikowski and fell asleep once again.
Reilly took his cigarette and stubbed it out. Straightening up, he glanced over his shoulder at the president, who was already looking a little more comfortable. We went to his bed. Dr. Kaplan said that poisoned or not, he was now quite stable and was going to be okay.
“It’s been a helluva long day,” groaned Reilly, pressing a fist into the small of his back. “So, Professor? What do you think?”
“I think that, all things considered, I wish I’d never left Princeton.”
XXVI
What were the consolations of philosophy? None. And, for most of Monday and Tuesday, Stalin’s words echoed in my mind: “For myself, I think I should prefer to have seen Hitler dead on the floor of that conference room than to have him walk out of these peace talks. I cannot speak for Mr. Hull, but I know that Mr. Mikoyan would gladly have gone to the wall if it had meant us being rid of a monster like Hitler.”
I’d never had much time for the pessimism of Schopenhauer, but finding one of his books in the library at Camp Amirabad, I read him again; and what Schopenhauer had said, that no honest man at the end of his life would want to relive his own life, seemed to ring in my ears like a funeral bell.
By Tuesday, Roosevelt had made a complete recovery, and the gala dinner at the British legation to celebrate Churchill’s sixty-ninth birthday now loomed. I debated not going but decided that consideration of Prime Minister Churchill’s feelings outweighed those of Marshal Stalin. What had still not dawned on me was how much of a leper I had become among my own people in Teheran. But immediately on my arrival at the British embassy, Harry Hopkins put me properly in the picture.
“Jesus, Mayer,” he hissed. “What the hell are you doing here?”
Churchill, overhearing this, advanced on him, growling like a bulldog defending a favorite ham bone.
“He’s here because I asked him, Harry. Professor Mayer is well aware that I should have regarded it as a personal insult if he had not come here tonight. Isn’t that so, Professor?”
“Yes, Prime Minister.”
“Excuse me, gentlemen.” The prime minister’s son Randolph, sober for once, took his father by the elbow. “May I speak to you for a minute, Papa?”
The prime minister turned away from my defense and stared at his son, kindly. “Yes, Randolph, what is it?”
Hopkins looked at me as if the stumps of my limbs were about to turn gangrenous. “All right,” he sighed. “But for Christ’s sake try to stay out of Stalin’s way. Things are difficult enough as it is.” Then he walked abruptly away and went over to speak to his own son, who was one of the guests.
Which was Churchill’s cue to come back and talk to me. Together we chatted and drank several glasses of champagne.
“My daughter did not think to tell me that there would be party games,” Churchill said, with patient good humor, as he watched Reilly and his Secret Service team search one half of the British legation, while the NKVD searched the other. “The trouble with a treasure hunt is that the searching is always more pleasurable than the finding. It is, I fear, self-evidently true of so much in life. And an axiom that even now, in my seventieth year, gives me much pause for thought. Indeed, I often ask myself the question: Will the final victory feel as good as the last battle?”
A few minutes later, Roosevelt arrived, pushed up a ramp that led onto the terrace by his son Elliott and wearing a shawl against the cooler air of the evening. Outside the front doors of the British embassy, and in the presence of an honor guard, Churchill greeted Roosevelt, who handed over his birthday present-a Persian bowl purchased from the hard-currency shop in the grounds of the Russian embassy.
“May we be together for many years,” Roosevelt told the beaming Churchill, and then allowed himself to be wheeled into the dining room. But seeing me, he looked the other way and began to speak to Averell Harriman.
“Speaking as one who has been shunned many times,” Churchill said, “I have always persuaded myself that it is better to be shunned than to be ignored.”
Taking me by the arm, he led me back out onto the front terrace, where the Sikh guard of honor now awaited only Stalin’s arrival. A large black limousine had appeared in the driveway of the legation and was now rolling up to the entrance, which was the cue for Churchill’s Sikhs to present arms.