The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (5 page)

Bliss Thatcher and Effie Wharton followed Ruth Sherwood and Sam. Lady Alicia and Kurt Hofmann went next. I fancied Mr. Hofmann for some reason looked a little uncomfortable. Lady Alicia for one thing was being frank to say the least about his former colleagues. Corliss Marshall and Sylvia behind them were listening, each with his own professional ears well-tuned. Pete Hamilton and Larry stood aside to let me and Senor Delvalle precede them. It hadn’t occurred to me until just then that there were more men than women present It seemed rather odd, with all the extra women around everywhere. Surely two female guests, I thought, had declined at the last moment.

I looked up at Pete as I passed him. There was something more than a little strange about his expression. He was looking at Corliss Marshall’s back; his jaw was like a hard rim of steel, and the spray of tiny lines around the corners of his eyes that I’d always associated with laughter didn’t have any laughter in them now. The look on his face was a kind of wary contempt—like the look of a prizefighter waiting for his opponent to lead with a tricky left below the belt. Corlisses neck was fat in back and a little moist, and a lock of hair that was supposed to cover up his bald spot had slipped down and uncovered it. I don’t know what it is about people’s backs that’s so revealing.

Sylvia glanced back at Pete and started to smile. The smile changed to a sharp flicker of anxiety. Her face went blank and social again as she turned back to make some remark to Corliss.

Senor Delvalle and I followed them through the doorway and past the iron staircase. Ruth Sherwood was almost to the dining room door—but not quite. Then she stopped abruptly. There was the sound of a key in the lock of the corridor door at the end of the little passage beside the stairs. The door opened. A girl’s voice said, “Thank you—just put it in here, please.”

I couldn’t see her, I could only hear her. But I could see Ruth Sherwood. She was wonderful.

“Oh, how nice!” she cried, as if she’d got the pleasantest surprise in all the world. She left Sam Wharton and rushed forward into the passage. “My dear! I didn’t expect you till tomorrow. Do come—I want you to meet my guests. We’re just going in to dinner.”

We were all just standing there, waiting. Then Ruth Sherwood came back. Beside her was a girl, about eighteen, I imagine. But it wasn’t that that made my hand on Senor Delvalle’s arm contract as sharply as if I’d been struck an unexpected blow. It was the girl herself. She was the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen in all my life.

Every one straightened up as if a star had suddenly fallen into the middle of the hall. Through the sudden silence Ruth Sherwood’s voice came as cool as April. Only her knuckles showed white where she gripped her daughter’s arm.

“I want you to meet a young friend of mine from New York,” she said. “Barbara Shipley. This is Mrs. Wharton, Barbara, and Mr. Wharton, and Lady Alicia Wrenn—”

I didn’t listen to the rest of it. All I was acutely aware of was Senor Delvalle’s saying, “I thought you weren’t the fainting type, Mrs. Latham.” And Lady Alicia saying, “I hope she’s had her dinner. I won’t sit down with thirteen at table. The last time I did, one of the guests was dead before morning.”

The girl standing there—Barbara Shipley, I had to remember to call her—broke off her shy and bewildered acknowledgment of her mother’s introductions to answer Lady Alicia’s brusque remark. “—I’ve had dinner already, coming down on the train.”

She was almost as tall as her mother, with that sort of heart-breaking clarity and youngness that no amount of bright red lipstick seems to affect. She had on the uniform of her age—a brown skirt and tan sweater and checked jacket, with a short fur coat over her arm and a brown felt hat in her hand. Her hair was reddish gold, cut in a long loosely curled bob, and her eyes were the color of tawny sherry with the sunlight shining through it.

“She’s
really
lovely,” I thought, my mind searching like mad—and in vain—for some explanation of this fantastic situation. And no one could possibly have guessed what the situation was. The bewildered uncertain look in her face could so easily have been embarrassment at bursting in on a dinner party the day before she was expected that nobody could think it was odd at all.

“Please go on in,” she said to her mother. “Can’t I just go up, and—”

“Of course, and come down after dinner,” Ruth Sherwood said. She turned to the suet butler. “Have Martha take Miss Shipley’s things to the green room. You’ll find everything you want, my dear. Make yourself completely at home. I’m sorry we’re so late.”

She moved back toward Sam Wharton. “—Let’s go in, shall we?”

The girl stood there for an instant, that lost and uncomprehending look widening her eyes. I saw her glance back at her bag and at the door and then upstairs, as if she didn’t know at all what to do. I felt horribly sorry for her. My kids would have said, “Hey, Mother, what’s the big idea anyway?” But then it would never have occurred to either of them to send a telegram asking if it was all right to come home—they’d just have come. The tone in Barbara’s voice as she’d told the bellboy to put her bag down had had that confidence in it too. She didn’t have it now, and she was almost poignantly moving, like a child who’d raised its face for a kiss and been roughly pushed away, not knowing why.

At the dining room door I glanced back. She was slowly following the maid up the stairs. Larry Villiers was looking back at her too, and a flicker of apprehension stirred inside me for an instant. I heard Hofmann say, “Here you are, Mrs. Latham, beside me,” and Senor Delvalle at my elbow say, “I should have slipped out here and changed the cards.”

His own place was between Effie Wharton and Lady Alicia. As he settled Effie’s chair into place she looked up at him and said coyly, “Habla usted Espanol?”

I stared at her, I’m afraid, and for an instant Senor Delvalle looked as if he couldn’t speak Spanish or English— either one. And then all he could manage was “Si, Senora. Y usted?”

“Don’t mind my wife,” Sam Wharton put in genially. “She’s just started Spanish lessons. She’s probably used her entire vocabulary already.”

“I thought you were going back to Berryville, Effie,”

Sylvia remarked. “Don’t tell me it’s South America instead.”

Effie Wharton flushed. Her carrot-red hair was more carroty than ever in the candlelight. She glanced quickly at her husband as if all this was something he wasn’t supposed to know about. And I’m sure it was to get off the subject on his account that she said, without the slightest relevance to anything, “There are too many people trying to get us into war.” She looked belligerently around the table.

“Did you say we had to go to war, Sylvia?” Pete asked, grinning.

“I didn’t mention the war.”

“That’s what you meant,” Effie retorted.

“And quite correctly.” Lady Alicia set down her gin and tonic with some vehemence. “The sooner America gets into it, the sooner it will be over.”

“Is that what you’ve come over for, Alicia darling—to help push us in?” Larry Villiers asked.

I looked at him, almost seeing Lady Alicia torn into neat bits and spread out to dry in “Shall We Join the Ladies?” He raised his spoon and sipped his green turtle soup with a bland little smile. Small-boned and delicate, blond with almost cruelly handsome features, sharp and intelligent, with a feline gift for other people’s weaknesses, he was as sensitive and neurotic as a woman. I think he tried to overcorrect his natural fastidiousness, because he deliberately dressed badly except in the evening, and I think in a way he hated his job. He envied people like Pete Hamilton—and Pete Hamilton especially. He’d wanted, at first at any rate, to be liked and taken seriously, and because he wasn’t he made up for it by making people hate him—especially men—and fear him— especially women.

Lady Alicia was apparently near-sighted spiritually as well as physically. “I shall certainly do my best,” she said vigorously.

“I’m happy to hear you say so, madame,” Kurt Hofmann said. I thought of the Delphic Oracle. I don’t know why he impressed me that way, unless it was his size and his monocle and the sabre slash down his cheek. “I hope you will go all over America, and speak to women in their clubs, and make them see—”

“That’s precisely what I’ve planned to do,” Lady Alicia interrupted. “But I must admit I’ve got astonishingly little help from our Embassy. It’s extraordin’ry.”

“Maybe they think we like to make up our own minds without any outside pressure,” Sylvia remarked sweetly.

“Nonsense,” said Lady Alicia. “You Americans haven’t yet realized what’s going on in the world. You’ve not got the faintest idea of what bombing means.”

“But of course you’re safely over here, out of it all, aren’t you?” Sylvia inquired innocently. “Tell me, how did you ever bring yourself to leave at a time like this? Didn’t you feel you ought to stay and help out, and let a couple of children come instead?”

There was a silence as clean and sharp as a razor edge. Out of it I expected Lady Alicia to issue a blast that would demolish the lot of us. I looked down. Nothing came—but in the black plate-glass table top I could see her face. It had collapsed into something tragic and really terrible.

“Don’t! Don’t say that!” she whispered.

It was awful, really. None of us could say a word. It was as if we were completely paralyzed. Then Bliss Thatcher at the end of the table managed to speak.

“By the way, Hofmann,” he said calmly. “How did you ever get out? You were in a concentration camp, weren’t you?”

“Yes,” Kurt Hofmann said. “It was through the help of a group of American writers. I was in a camp in France. I can’t tell you the method because it might prevent others like me from being rescued. It took me twenty-nine days to get to Lisbon.”

“—Did you get the letter I wrote you, Kurt?” It was Lady Alicia who said that, though for a moment I don’t think any of us recognized her voice. It had lost its strident determined quality. “I wanted to ask you when I came in.”

“No,” Hofmann said quietly. “I did not get it.”

“It was after I got your letter from Leves. You’d just got to the pensionnaires’ home. I remembered it all so well— the day we walked out there, and ate lunch in the field of red poppies and ripe corn. I have both those letters—the one you wrote the next day and the one you wrote this summer. I was so happy you thought of me again, and then I thought my friends at St. Cyr could help you.”

“I am afraid it was your friends at St. Cyr that enabled them to find me and put me in the concentration camp, Alicia,” Mr. Hofmann said. “It was there the Americans got to me, through a former caretaker of the Cathedral at Chartres. Poor little chap. He is in a prison himself now. Or I hope he is.”

“Why do you say that?” Sylvia asked.

“I mean, I hope he is not dead, mademoiselle,” Hofmann returned coolly.

A little shudder seemed to go around the table. I suppose it could only have been fancy, but I thought even the candle-points flickered, as if a door somewhere had opened and shut again.

Ruth Sherwood pushed her chair back. Her face was quite pale.

“I wonder if you’ll excuse me a moment. I must see if my young guest is all right. I shan’t be but a moment.”

I wondered if she’d really heard a word that had been said. It was hardly the kind of dinner-table conversation a hostess would choose. But at that it was much better than what was to come. It was Bliss Thatcher again who did it, and at the time I thought he was only trying to change the subject.

“There’s something you fellows can tell me,” he said, looking from Corliss Marshall to Pete Hamilton. “All of you in the newspaper game ought to know. Who writes this newsletter called ‘Truth Not Fiction’?”

I thought, “Oh, Lord.”

The silence was deafening—but it wasn’t solid and stunning as it had been at Sylvia’s remarkable gaffe. It was divided into separate little compartments that apparently Lady Alicia and Kurt Hofmann and Effie and Sam Wharton had no share in, and that the rest of us did—the others because apparently they knew what it was about, and me only because Sylvia had been so upset.

She was now. I could see her reflection in the glass table top as I’d seen Lady Alicia’s. Her face had gone perfectly blank, as if she for one had never heard of “Truth Not Fiction.” The angles at the corners of Corliss Marshall’s mouth went down sharply. Larry seemed to fold up inside himself, Pete to expand and become suddenly hot and sultry. Senor Delvalle leaned back in his chair and looked calmly from one of them to the Other.

“I understand the F. B. I. is working on it,” Bliss Thatcher said. “I must say I think people should be willing to sign their names to what they write. Also to distribute it without trying to hide its place of origin.”

“Maybe they’re afraid to,” Effie Wharton said with determination.

“But there are no concentration camps in America, madame,” Mr. Hofmann put in.

“There ought to be,” Corliss said irascibly. “The sooner we put a stop to this sort of thing the better.”

“You want to muzzle the press, Marshall?” Sam Wharton asked.

“—Before the press muzzles him, I guess.” That was Pete Hamilton; and Corliss’s face was red and mottled with gray again. If he’d had an apoplectic stroke I shouldn’t have been surprised in the least.

“Do you think ‘Truth Not Fiction’ is a good thing to have going around, Hamilton?” Bliss Thatcher asked.

“I don’t read it,” Pete returned coolly. “I’m not on its mailing list.”

“That’s because you aren’t in
Who’s Who
or the
Social Register
,” Larry Villiers said.

“It happens I am in
Who’s Who,
as you know.—I just think it’s dangerous to have censorship of any kind.”

“And what really is this newsletter?” Hofmann asked.

Ruth Sherwood’s return stopped the conversation a moment. She looked much less tense, I thought. She smiled around the table.

“We’re talking about ‘Truth Not Fiction,’ Ruth,” Mr. Thatcher said.

“Again?” She laughed. “What about it? It comes to me regularly.”

Thatcher turned to Kurt Hofmann.

“It’s a newsletter circulated, as far as anyone can make out, only among people of some means,” he said. “It’s mailed from New York, Chicago, and San Francisco, but it seems to be written here in Washington. Or a good deal of the stuff is dug up here. The whole thing’s designed to rouse fear about the value of money, the stability of investments and real estate, and the ability of the country to put over the defense program—including the intentions of its leaders in government and industry. It’s a clever piece of work. Whether its effects are very good we don’t know. There are two or three known instances like this: an elderly woman with a small invested income who turned on the gas in her kitchen had a copy of it in her hand when she was found. It was about the prospect of inflation.”