The Murder of a Fifth Columnist (20 page)

“Why, it’s Effie,” Congressman Wharton said heatedly. “You know she doesn’t know anything about politics or economics. All she’s concerned with is fixing up some way so she won’t have to go back home.
I’ve
let her down—
I
haven’t any ambition—
I’m
content to go back home and vegetate. And she’s right, by Gad. I
am,
and that’s what I intend to do. She can come with me, or she can stay here. I’m tired of living in this two-by-four place, eating restaurant food, never having a home or a minute’s letup. I’ve stayed here because she wanted me to, but I’m through. I told her last night I was through before she pulled this Kurt Hofmann South America business on me, right after you left.”

If I’d thought Congressman Wharton was heated at the outset, he was violent now.

“And I meant it, by Gad! I still mean it!”

He brought his fist down with a sweep on the table. The lamp bounced up and had danced just to the edge before I caught it.

“I just found out this morning she’s even been high-pressuring Delvalle!”

He took out his handkerchief and mopped his forehead, and made a strong effort to control himself.

“This business last night. The first I heard of it was when she told Grace here over the phone. She’d fixed it up with this son-of-a-gun Hofmann. He had a friend interested in South America. I was to go down there and lecture, and what it boiled down to was I was to hamstring all the economic co-operation I’ve worked like a dog for all the time I was in Congress. That’s all Effie knows about what I believe! It wasn’t stated in so many words, but that’s what it meant That so-and-so—excuse me, Grace—talking to Effie and a lot of other people around here got it into his head that I was disgruntled by my defeat in November. He thought I’d be glad to go down there…”

Sam got up again and paced the floor. Then he came back and sat down again.

“It makes me so damn mad I can’t see straight. I went down there and told him if he didn’t get out of this country and stay out I’d tar and feather him and run him out on a rail. I didn’t give a damn whether he was a distinguished author or what he was. Then Lamb comes this morning and says he’s been killed. All I’ve got to say is whoever did it performed a public service, and if he ever wants to run for office I want to vote for him!”

He glared at us once more. Colonel Primrose nodded very gravely.

“All right, Sam. Excuse us, will you? I don’t want to talk to you anymore.”

“—It’s curious,” he remarked to me when we’d got out and were waiting for the elevator, “how long a man and woman can live together with no real knowledge of each other. They’ve been married say thirty-five years. I don’t suppose it’s ever occurred to Effie that Sam
believed
the things he stood for up on the Hill. It certainly’s never occurred to Sam that she’s anything but an amiable rattlebrain. Of course she thinks she made him—and if Sam had been personally ambitious, and not quite as smart as he is, this could have been a pretty serious kind of tiling. And Hofmann believed the European legend that all the men in this country are run by their women.”

We got out of the elevator and went through the main lobby. Señor Delvalle and Pete Hamilton were just going out the front entrance. I saw Sergeant Buck disengage himself from the punchboard on the newsstand counter and move along after them with iron deliberation. He seemed to me to have been badly equipped by Nature for the role of The Shadow, especially of any one as keen as Delvalle, and I said so to Colonel Primrose. He just smiled.

“Excuse me a minute,” he said. He went over to the desk, and I nodded to Larry Villiers, who’d been talking to Delvalle and Pete before they went out. He came over to me.

“If that guy was in a plane wreck, he’d land on his feet with a bottle of cream in a strawberry patch,” he said, not enviously exactly but certainly without enthusiasm.

“Who? And why?” I asked.

“Pete Hamilton. Delvalle has just offered him a swell job down in the pampas.”

“I thought he couldn’t, because of this so-called cloud. With all the Fifth Column and what not.”

Larry looked at me with his faint smile.

“Don’t be naive, darling. I’m sure the Colonel finds it charming, but after all— Was Sylvia up and around, by the way?”

I nodded, and he broke off as Colonel Primrose came back.

“Good morning, Colonel,” he said. “Are you responsible, by any chance, for the interest the gendarmes are taking in me?”

His small delicate blond face turned from one to the other of us.

“Because if you are, I wish you’d tell them to put my things back where they find them. I had to hunt half an hour this morning for my stuff.—I’m flattered, of course. If I could write ‘Truth Not Fiction’ do you suppose I’d scrabble along on fifty a week, licking the snoots of all the swine gathered at the public trough?”

He spoke with such distilled bitterness that I was appalled.

“Or do you think I like having people like Corliss Marshall and Pete Hamilton always taking cracks at me? I know I’m a second-rater. It’s no news to me.”

Colonel Primrose listened politely.

“Your Captain Lamb comes up and fixes me with a beady eye and says, ‘What were you doing last night between 10.30 and 1.00, young man?’ What the hell
would
I be doing? Just what I’m always doing—listening to some third secretary glamor boy bleat about how difficult life is. However, let’s skip it. I guess the champagne was worse than I thought it was.”

He turned away.

“It must have been,” Colonel Primrose said. “Come along.”

He shook his head a little.

“It’s too bad that fellow can’t do the job he’s cut out for and let it go at that. He’s Effie Wharton on another level.”

“Delvalle thinks he’s in love with Sylvia,” I said.

Colonel Primrose smiled.

“I’d be happy if you’d quit quoting Delvalle to me, Mrs. Latham,” he said.

“Sorry. I thought you’d be interested in the idea. What do we do now?”

“Mrs. Sherwood,” he said laconically.

I couldn’t help feeling a little chill when Ruth Sherwood’s butler took Colonel Primrose’s hat and coat and put them beside someone else’s across the back of the sofa—just where Corliss Marshall’s had still been, two nights before, when all the others had gone. The someone else was Bliss Thatcher, I saw when we’d got to the library. He was pacing back and forth, tense and tight-jawed, and he looked as if he hadn’t slept for a week.

He nodded to us.

“Sorry about this, Thatcher,” Colonel Primrose said. “I thought you ought to be here.”

Bliss Thatcher didn’t say anything. I had no idea of what was going on—whether Colonel Primrose really thought Ruth Sherwood was concerned in the murder of Hofmann or not—but I knew that it was something very serious, and that Bliss Thatcher knew it too. And Ruth Sherwood. When she came down she was wearing a black dress with a gold-and-topaz clip at the throat. Her skin was pale gold like the topaz and as bloodless, and she had the look on her face of one who’d come along a road with no turning aside or back, and nothing but some sheer blank precipice ahead—and no choice but to meet it without flinching.

Betty was with her, looking so deeply bewildered that whatever fear there was in her face was numbed and secondary. She sat beside her mother on the sofa, folding her hands in her lap the way her mother’s were folded.

“I’ve asked my daughter to come down too, Colonel Primrose, if you don’t mind,” she said quietly. “And I’ll ask you to let me say what I have to say at once. It isn’t easy, but it’s easier than you may think… because I’ve been on the point of doing it for several weeks now.

“I’ll begin at the beginning—not in extenuation, but so you’ll understand. My husband died twelve years ago in South America. I found after his death that we were penniless and in debt. Betty was five, and I was at my wit’s end. I had no training and no relatives to turn to. My husband’s lawyer brought a friend of his to see me one day—he was also a lawyer, the representative of European concerns in South America, he said. They wanted a civilized cultivated establishment where they could unofficially entertain important people from all parts of the world. They’d pay me to do this for them—all I had to do was go on living as I’d always lived. From time to time I’d be sent lists of people for dinner or houseguests, and the only restriction I was under was to submit my own list of additional guests when I was entertaining theirs.”

Her eyes rested on Bliss Thatcher for an instant.

“It was supposed to be an unofficial commercial embassy, and I think it was, until the recent regime abroad. I knew, of course, that it was in opposition to American commercial interests, but they were private. I wasn’t the only American employee of foreign companies, and I wasn’t doing anything treasonable—then. And it was only two years ago that I began to understand the change that was taking place down there. I realized that I was involved in the very spearhead of the Fifth-Column movement there, that my house was cover for the important meetings of people who expected to take control of governments.”

She hesitated a moment.

“Betty had been at school in Baltimore since she was twelve. I visited her twice a year. The new people who’d taken over knew I had a child, but they had never seen her. I began to realize, still vaguely, that it was important they didn’t see her, and I moved her to another school in New York two years ago. I wanted to give up the house at that time. I won’t go into it, but I found I was no longer a free agent. It wasn’t until this summer that I was allowed to… to retire. I found then that the house I thought was mine was only mine as long as I was there. And I realized—though I was given the opportunity to change my mind in the most agreeable way possible—that I was worse off than I’d been at my husband’s death.—I was older, I still had a child to support and I had no friends left after fifteen years abroad.”

Bliss Thatcher took a cigarette and lighted it, his face flushing angrily.

“I was told, very pleasantly, that even the clothes I had on my back were not my own. Nevertheless I… considering the changed status of my own country, and knowing what I was now doing, I felt I hadn’t any choice, and I came home. I thought with my knowledge of languages I could get a job of some kind, and Betty could go to public schools, and we’d manage. I… I didn’t realize what a long arm destiny has.”

Colonel Primrose was looking at her very intently. I had the feeling that he’d known all this, and that it was what was coming that he was interested in.

“I almost got several jobs, and each time I was told there’d been a mistake, that someone else had been appointed. I don’t know whether you’ve ever suddenly realized that you weren’t going to eat in another week—and not only you but your child. I was almost desperate. Then, when it seemed to me the gas stove was the only way out, Kurt Hofmann—that’s the only name I knew him by—came to me in New York. He said they needed someone in Washington. They’d pay me a lump sum and make all the arrangements. It was purely social and propagandist—a chance to get some new concepts before the proper people. I’d never be embarrassed in any way—nor my government. Well, I came. I tried to convince myself I wasn’t doing the wrong thing, even though all the arguments I used during the day would haunt me at night.”

Colonel Primrose said, “What about ‘Truth Not Fiction,’ Mrs. Sherwood?”

“Kurt Hofmann told me about that. He said some one in Washington wrote it and he’d found an innocent angel to finance it. He’d convinced him it had to be done secretly because of fear of reprisals. I saw a few issues after I came down here. I knew it was the old story. If people can be made to believe industrial leaders are working against the government, and any man who speaks his mind is in league with the enemy, and the government is dishonest and nothing is secure—the Army and Navy incompetent and ill-equipped and democracy decadent—then half the battle of dividing and ruling is won.”

She stopped a moment and went on, looking ahead of her into the fire, her voice no longer steady and composed.

“This is very difficult for me to say. You see… coming up on the ship I’d met Mr. Thatcher. I was alarmed because of the position he was in. Hofmann promised me that his name would never be used in ‘Truth Not Fiction,’ nor any information that ever came from him. But he insisted that I have him to dinner the other night.”

She hadn’t looked at Bliss Thatcher since she’d first mentioned his name. He was sitting forward in his chair, under some extraordinary emotional compulsion, never taking his eyes off her. It flashed into my mind that the fact that she was talking about him was of secondary importance to the fact that she was also explaining herself.

“When I got Betty’s telegram that she was coming, I was almost out of my mind,” Ruth Sherwood said. “Kurt Hofmann had asked to meet her, and I said she was away. I’d told Mr. Thatcher about her, and I knew that when he saw that photograph in Kurt Hofmann’s hands he thought I’d been lying. But I had to. When she came, there was nothing I wouldn’t have done to keep him from knowing who she was… nothing. But yesterday he found out…”

“And this morning, he is dead,” Colonel Primrose said.

“Yes—this morning he’s dead.”

There was a long silence. Then she said:

“I told you I’d been trying to get courage enough to go to the Justice Department and tell them about all this, for the last three weeks. I decided last night. That’s why I called you both this morning—before Captain Lamb came to question me about Hofmann’s death.”

She rose unsteadily. “And now, if you will excuse me, please—”

Colonel Primrose and Bliss Thatcher got up.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Sherwood,” Colonel Primrose said gently. “I have to ask you one question, I’m afraid. When did you first hear of Gordon Lacey?”

“Who?”

“A newspaperman named Gordon Lacey.”

“I have never heard of him, to my knowledge.”

“He helped the real Hofmann write his book.”

“I’ve never heard of him,” Ruth Sherwood repeated.

“He was discussed at your dinner table the other evening, at considerable length.”