The Murder of a Fifth Columnist Read Free Page B

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.
    “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