The Murder of a Fifth Columnist Read Free

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