The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (2 page)

“There’s Pete Hamilton,” I said. “I should think that would decide you.”

She made an odd little sound as if something had caught her off her guard and hurt her.

“What’s the matter?” I demanded. “I thought you and Pete were practically middle-aisling it, as you call it?”

Pete Hamilton was in the process of dropping a whole canape into his mouth to keep it from disintegrating down his shirt front.

“I don’t mean Pete,” Sylvia said. “He’s just a virus that’s got into my blood stream. Not even sulphanilamide will get him out.”

I’d always seen her crisp and soignée, and rather hard, as a matter of fact, but just now her voice was as soft as the smoky folds of her chiffon skirt. And a little hopeless as she added, “I wish I’d fallen in love with somebody else. Every time I go to a party I think ‘Well, maybe tonight—’ ”

She shrugged her shoulders and laughed. “It’s the rest of them, dear. Every time I see Larry Villiers I think of jellied eels. If I didn’t have to eat once a day I’d give up my job. I’m getting fed up with people who say, ‘My dear, your column is marvelous—it’s even better than “Shall We Join the Ladies?” ’ And look at old Corliss Marshall. He’s like Dorothy Thompson the day she said she had to remind herself she wasn’t God. Now he knows all about South America too. If there was just
one
place he didn’t know all about. And don’t look now, darling, but there, in addition, you have what Larry and I will call A Brilliant Galaxy of the Distinguished Visitors Who Are Making Washington the Cosmopolitan Capital of the World.”

“Which ones?” I asked.

“Don’t tell me you don’t know. Haven’t you met Senor Estevan Delvalle with his ear to the ground listening for the stampede of Western beef? He’s the dark little man there by Sam Wharton.”

“Poor Sam,” I said. I could see Congressman Wharton’s fine white mane and broad shoulders, but not Senor Delvalle. I knew he was an unofficial observer for one of the so-called democracies South of the Border.

“Poor Sam my eye,” Sylvia said. “You mean poor Effie. Sam told me he was glad he was defeated—he’s sick of Washington. And I think he is. But Effie’ll stay if she can, by hook or crook. She’s talking about a Strong Opposition as if the term was invented to keep Sam in Washington. That’s all she talks about.”

“Who’s the handsome blond she’s talking to,” I asked.

“That, my dear, is Kurt Hofmann. You’ve read
Terror Unleashed
?”

I nodded. I’d read the famous anti-Totalitarian book. It was the monocle that threw me off, and I said so.

“Oh, that’s what he uses to peek through keyholes into totalitarian bedchambers,” Sylvia replied. “You know, I don’t see why, if he was so inside as he says he was, and they’re as ruthless as he says they are, they don’t quietly drop him in the river below the morgue some night when the cops aren’t looking.”

She took my arm with a sudden impulsive gesture and laughed.

“I’m in a filthy mood,” she said. “I shouldn’t have come. It must be that new persimmon astringent I’m using to disguise my age. But you know, sometimes I think if I ever again have to hear the country’s gone to hell and there’s nothing to do but arm the Boy Scouts, I’ll shriek. I wouldn’t have come if Bliss Thatcher wasn’t coming.”

“Oh, good,” I said. “He’s taken my house. He’s awfully nice.”

She nodded. “I had the idea,” she said slowly, “that seeing a man who’d weathered the stigma of industrialism, and had gone quietly to work without saying industry is stymied and if you won’t play my way I won’t play at all, would be good for my psyche.”

She smiled.

“—That and any chance to be in the same room Pete’s in for a couple of hours, with the chance he might take me some place later for a post mortem. Oh well, let’s skip it. Shall we join the ladies?”

I’ve known Sylvia Peele a long time, though not as intimately as all that would seem to indicate, and I’d never seen her anything but blank and social, being terribly nice to people who mattered and looking as through a stone wall at people who didn’t. Her family had a lot of money until 1929. In 1928 they’d announced her engagement to a young count in one of the central European embassies. He married a girl whose family didn’t lose their money, and Sylvia got a job as a society reporter. Some people thought it was that that made “Peelings” such a perfect name for her column; the peelings were so frequently off the hides of people who’d dropped her after 1929 and tried to pick her up later. She was about thirty. She’d never married, though there was always the gossip that connected her and Pete Hamilton. I thought she was very attractive—not pretty but smart, with an extraordinary face concealing a sharp intelligence behind a perfectly made-up lacquered mask and blank hazel eyes that didn’t quite track and were a great part of her charm. I liked her—in spite of herself, I suppose, because I had the idea that a lot of her surface was a shell she’d grown and kept highly polished to protect her from any more blows.

“—And by the way,” she asked, as we moved toward the door, “who the devil is Mrs. Addison Sherwood? Tell me about her.”

I shook my head. “I was going to ask you.”

She laughed, a little mirthlessly. “That’s Washington for you. We’ll ask Corliss. He wouldn’t risk a dinner unless he knew the shade of pink they’d lined his hostess’s bassinet with.”

She stopped, looking into the long room.

“All I know about her is what I’ve read in ‘Shall We Join the Ladies?’ She’s rich, if that means anything. She’s just come to town. She goes everywhere, usually with your tenant Bliss Thatcher. It seems to me I heard she’d had some sort of tragedy. If I didn’t hear so much I could keep it sorted out better.—Oh, I remember. It’s about a child. It’s sort of—”

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 that 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.