The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (3 page)

“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 without 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.

“They’ve done a frightfully nice job,” Mrs. Sherwood said. “My name’s Ruth, by the way—I forgot you didn’t know it. They took out the ceiling and put in these stairs.”

We’d got to the top of the landing. She stopped abruptly, glancing back down the stairs, her hand tightening on my arm.

I suppose I looked as completely staggered as I felt at the extraordinary change that had come over her. Her face was the most perfect mask of tragedy I’ve ever seen—tragedy, and fear so total that it was almost appalling.

“—Forgive me, please!” she whispered urgently. “You have a child, haven’t you?”

“Two,” I said.

Her hand gripped my arm tightly.

“Then will you for God’s sake do something for me?”

For a moment I thought either she’d lost her mind or I’d lost mine.

“Of course,” I said. “I’ll be glad to. What is it you want me to do?”

She let my arm go and pushed her hair back from her forehead, like someone coming back to her senses. She looked quickly back of her again.

“Go to your room and telephone my daughter in New York.”

Her voice was scarcely a whisper.

“—I’ll write down her number for you.”

There was another glass console table against the white wall in front of us, between two doors. It had a telephone on it, and beside it a pad and pencil.

“Tell her you’re calling for me, and that I say it’s most inconvenient for me to have her herb, and I’d prefer she didn’t come. Tell her I’ll be in New York on Tuesday and I’ll see her then.”

She turned her head away a moment.

“You see…”

She hesitated painfully, and looked back at me. “You see, she wouldn’t fit in. She’s just a child, and…”

“You don’t have to explain, Mrs. Sherwood,” I said. I couldn’t possibly have called her Ruth just then. It seemed like such a… well, I suppose,
shocking
thing—just to tell your child not to come home. Still, she was so distraught that I was really sorry for her.

I must have looked at the phone there in front of us, because she said, “I can’t phone from this apartment—the servants would hear me.”

That seemed to me an extraordinary explanation indeed,
and she couldn’t help realize it.

“Believe me—it’s dreadfully important,” she said, with a kind of suppressed desperation. “I wouldn’t ask you if it weren’t.” She picked up the pencil and scrawled a number on the back of the telegram and handed it to me. “You can go through this door. Your apartment is the third on the left.”

I took the blank and opened the door.

“Thank you, Grace Latham,” she said. “Thank you—more than you know!”

I couldn’t look at her. The relief in her voice was too terrible. I just hurried along the corridor to my door. I didn’t even look back to see if she was waiting for me.

I unlocked my door and went in to the bedroom, went to the phone and gave the operator the number. As I waited I realized abruptly that Mrs. Sherwood hadn’t told me her daughter’s name. I turned over the wire and looked at the signature. As I looked, my eye caught the date line, and I looked again. The time was 12:05
p.m.
And the message said—I read it shamelessly—“Coming down unless you wire you don’t want me—love, Betty.”

I looked at my watch. It was seventeen minutes past eight. Something had obviously happened that had delayed that telegram’s delivery… and that meant that that child was in all probability well on her way. I started to signal the operator to change it to a person to person call, but just as I did a woman’s voice said, “Hello—this is Devereaux.”

“It must be a school,” I thought. I said, “May I speak to Miss Elizabeth Sherwood?”

There was, the kind of pause you expect to have followed by “Sorry, there’s no one here of that name.” Instead the woman said, “Who is calling, please?”

“I’m calling for her mother in Washington,” I said. “I have a message for her.”

“I’m very sorry,” the woman said. “Elizabeth Sherwood is not here just now.”

“Do you know if she’s left for Washington?” I asked.

“I’m sorry,” the woman said. “I couldn’t tell you.” If she’d said, “I won’t tell you,” it would have matched her tone better.

“Her mother is anxious to have her put off her coming,” I said. “Will you try to get that message to her?”

“Thank you,” the woman said. “Goodbye.”

I heard the phone click down. It all seemed stranger than ever. I sat there with the phone in my hand. Suddenly I heard her voice again.

“—Operator,” she said crisply.

I realized that we hadn’t been disconnected, so I said, “Yes?”

“Operator—this is the Devereaux School.”

She hadn’t recognized my voice, apparently.

“Can you tell me where the call I’ve just had came from?”

“Washington,” I said.

“Thank you.”

It may have been my imagination, but I thought there was a definite relief in her voice. She hung up then, and so did I. She’d evidently thought it was a local call. And that was odd too. Of course I knew that some schools live in mortal terror of kidnapping, and are reluctant to give information about their pupils, but this was watchful suspicion of a very special order. My curiosity was growing by the minute.