The Amirabad U.S. Army base was close to the Gale Morghe Airport, yet despite the noise of American C-54s arriving throughout the night, carrying materiel for the Russian war effort, I slept extremely well. This was easy. I had a proper bed, instead of a wooden pallet next to an open slops bucket. And the door of my room had a key I was allowed to keep. Like most army camps, the accommodations and facilities at Amirabad were basic. That was just fine with me, too. After three nights as the guest of the Cairo police, the camp felt like the Plaza. I saw a couple of army football teams practicing their plays on a field of mud. But there was little time to see if they were any good. Not that I cared very much either way. I wouldn’t have known a good football team from the choir at the Mount Zion United Methodist Church. After a hurried breakfast of coffee and scrambled eggs, a jeep took Bohlen and me not to the American legation, as before, but to the Russian embassy.
Beyond its heavily guarded exterior walls, the main part of the embassy was a square building of light-brown stone set in a small park. On its front was a handsome portico with white Doric columns and, behind these, six arched French windows. In the distance I saw fountains, a small lake, and several other villas, one of them now occupied by Stalin and Molotov, his foreign commissar, and all of them closely guarded by yet more Russian troops armed with submachine guns.
The president was already in official residence in the main building, having been smuggled into the embassy in the early hours of the morning. But as far as most people other than the Joint Chiefs and the Secret Service knew, he was still at the American legation. Bohlen and I found Roosevelt seated alongside Hopkins, who was perched on the edge of a two-seater leather sofa in a small drawing room at the back of the residence.
On the floor was a new Persian rug with a peacock motif that matched the light blue curtains; behind the president’s shoulder was an ornate table lamp and, to the side, a huge oil-fired radiator. Clearly the Russians had tried to make Roosevelt comfortable, but the general effect was as if the interior decorator had been Joseph Stalin himself.
Reilly came into the room, closing the door behind him.
“Marshall and Arnold?” asked Roosevelt.
“No, sir,” said Reilly.
“Churchill?”
Reilly shook his head.
“Fuck,” said Roosevelt. “Fuck!… So who are we waiting for?”
“Admiral Leahy, sir.”
Roosevelt caught sight of Bohlen and me and motioned us to sit.
I saw that Hopkins had Reichleitner’s Beketovka File on his lap. He patted the file. “Explosive stuff,” he said to me as Roosevelt began to curse Generals Marshall and Arnold yet again. “But I’m sure you’ll understand why we can’t act on any of this.”
I nodded. In truth I had seen this coming.
“Not right now. For the same reason we couldn’t do anything about the Katyn Forest massacre.”
And then he handed the file back to me.
The door opened again and Leahy came into the room, followed closely by Agent Pawlikowski, who took up a position of vigilance between me and the door. To my left, I had a pretty good view of the president. And to my right, I had an equally good view of Pawlikowski, which was how I came to notice that one of his jacket’s three buttons was different from the other two.
I looked away so as not to arouse suspicion. When I looked back again, I knew there could be no doubt about it. The button was plain black, whereas the other two looked like tortoise-shell. The original button was missing. But was it the same as the one I had seen on the floor in Elena’s bedroom? It was hard to be sure.
“Thanks for coming, Bill,” Roosevelt said to Leahy. “Well, it looks like this is it.”
“Yes, sir, it does,” said Leahy.
“Any last reservations?”
“No, sir,” said Leahy. “What about Winston?”
Roosevelt shook his head bitterly.
“Stubborn old bastard,” said Leahy.
“Fuck him,” shrugged Hopkins. “We don’t need him for this. In fact, it’s probably best he’s not here. Besides, in the long run, he’ll come around. You’ll see. He has no choice but to do what we do. Any other position would be untenable.”
“I sure hope you’re right,” said Roosevelt.
There was a moment or two of silence, during which time I sought another look at Pawlikowski. It was much cooler in Teheran than in Cairo, but I couldn’t help but notice that the Secret Service agent was sweating heavily. He mopped his brow with a handkerchief several times, and as he raised his arm I caught sight of the. 45-caliber automatic in the shoulder holster beneath his jacket. Then he caught me looking at him.
“I couldn’t bum a cigarette off you, could I?” I asked him. “I left mine back at Amirabad.”
Pawlikowksi said nothing, just dipped his hand into his coat pocket and took out a pack of Kools. He knocked one out for me and then lit it.
“Thanks.” I was now quite certain Pawlikowski was my man. And who better than a Polish-American to assassinate Stalin? But even as I pictured Pawlikowski in the radio room at Elena’s house, I heard Roosevelt speaking to me.
“With Churchill and two of my Joint Chiefs sulking in their tents, I can’t afford any more losses in this negotiating team. Not now. And especially not you boys. You are my ears and my voice. Without you, this would be over before it even got started. So whatever happens, I want both of you to make a personal promise that you won’t duck out on me. I want your word that you’ll see this through, no matter how repugnant you might find your duties as translators. Especially you, Willard, since the major part of what happens today is going to fall on your shoulders. And I must also apologize for keeping you both in the dark. But here’s the thing. If we get this morning right, I believe the world will thank us. But if we screw up, it’ll be the dirtiest secret in the history of this conflict. Perhaps of all time.”
“I won’t desert you, Mr. President,” I said, still wondering what the hell this was all about. “You have my word on it.”
“Mine, too, sir,” said Bohlen.
Roosevelt nodded and then spun his chair into action. “All right. Let’s do this.”
Pawlikowski leaped to open the door for his boss, but instead of turning toward the main door of the residence, Roosevelt propelled himself toward the end of the corridor, where Mike Reilly was already grappling with a heavy steel door. I followed the president’s small party through it and down a long slope. It felt as if we were going into a bomb shelter.
Pawlikowski caught up with me and we walked down the corridor. I thought to tell him that I was on to him, if only as a deterrent, but he suddenly accelerated forward to open another door that led into yet another corridor, this one level and almost fifty yards long. It was well lit and seemed recently constructed.
We reached a third door, this one guarded by two uniformed NKVD who, seeing the president, came to attention smartly, the heels of their jackboots clicking loudly. Then one of them turned and knocked three times. The door swung open slowly, and Pawlikowski and Reilly led our small party into the vast round room that lay beyond.
There were no windows inside that room, which was as big as a tennis court and lit by an enormous brass light that hung over a Camelot-sized round table with a green baize cover.
Around the table were two rings of chairs: the inner ring, fifteen ornate mahogany chairs upholstered in a Persian-patterned silk; the outer ring, twelve smaller chairs, on each of which lay a notepad and a pencil. The room itself was guarded by ten NKVD men positioned at regular intervals around the tapestry-covered walls, stoic and unmoving, like so many suits of armor. Roosevelt’s Secret Service agents took up positions between the NKVD guards along the same circular wall.
Sixty seconds later, I hardly noticed any of this. Sixty seconds later I hardly noticed Stalin, or Molotov, or Beria, or Voroshilov, his Red Army field marshal. Sixty seconds later, even Pawlikowski was forgotten. Sixty seconds later, as I stared openmouthed at the man coming through a door on the opposite side of the chamber, and then at the others who accompanied him, I wouldn’t have noticed if Betty Grable had climbed onto my lap and stripped down to her ankle-strap platforms.
In any other circumstances I might have assumed it was a joke. Except that the man was now advancing on Roosevelt with an outstretched hand, wearing a smile on his face as if he were actually pleased to see the president of a country on which he had personally declared war.
The man was Adolf Hitler.