Natalie stood. She was almost as tall as Haven, and he backed up a step. “Are you accusing me of lying?”
“No, ma’am. But he is your boss and your friend. You might have been tempted to do something to protect him.”
“From what?”
Haven recovered and managed a tight smile. “Maybe from being arrested, Miss Holt, if he did tell some of his queer friends about his work. Do you know where he lives?”
“Yes.”
“Good. I’m new here and not familiar with all of Washington and I’d like you to come with me.”
“No, Agent Haven, I will not. You’re a rude and bullying man and I will not take you to see where Mr. Barnes lives. You know how much you terrify and upset Barnes, and I think you take great pleasure in it.”
She was also reasonably certain Haven would make a pass at her if he got her alone in a car.
To her surprise, Haven actually laughed. Maybe he thought being disliked was a compliment. “Okay, have it your way. Will you take Forbes?”
The other agent was across the room and grinned affably upon hearing his name. Forbes was easygoing and friendly. The father of three kids, he was not always trying to mentally undress her. She quickly agreed.
Half an hour later, they pulled up in front of the undistinguished apartment building where Walter Barnes lived. Forbes used his FBI identification on the manager to gain access to the building and quickly found Barnes’s apartment. After a number of futile knocks on the door, they got the manager to give them a key.
“Should we be doing this alone?” Natalie asked.
“Probably not,” he said. The door opened to a darkened room and he flipped on a light. “But I’m not going to phone for help for what is most likely an empty set of rooms. My money says he’s run off. The Bureau’s having a field day picking on fags in State and he probably panicked. Stay here.”
After a moment he told her to come in. The apartment had a living room, a small kitchen, and a bedroom. All three rooms were fastidiously clean. The bed was made and everything on the dresser was standing as if on display. There were no socks on the floor or anything out of place. Instinctively, she knew that Steve Burke would not be so neat. Even the closets were open and the clothes hung with care, as if their owner knew someone else was going to see them. A photo of the young man from Personnel was proudly displayed on the dresser. Forbes picked it up, looked at it for a moment, and put it down.
“Have you checked the bathroom?” she asked.
“I didn’t see one. Isn’t it a shared one down the hall?” Forbes said.
“No,” she answered, “you don’t know Barnes. He was an extremely private person, especially so about any personal ablutions. It was almost a joke. He wouldn’t clip a fingernail if he thought someone might see him doing it.”
“Aw shit,” said Forbes as he looked about the room. Something was wrong and he’d missed it. He walked to a drape on the wall and jerked it aside. A door was behind it.
“So fastidious that he even hid the entrance to his damned john? Good grief,” Forbes said with nervous laughter. He had almost made a big mistake by missing the room.
He tried the door. Both he and Natalie looked at each other in growing horror. The door was locked from the inside. Forbes was a big man and he put a shoulder to it, and the cheap wood shattered immediately. He reached in and turned the knob and opened the door.
Forbes groaned and Natalie strained to see inside the bathroom. When she realized what was lying pale and naked in the brown-red water of the bathtub, she vomited on the floor and ran into the hallway outside the apartment, where she began to cry. Behind her, she heard Forbes talking on the telephone. After a moment he came out in the hallway and stood beside her.
“I’m sorry you saw that, Miss Holt.”
“So am I.”
“Are you going to be okay?”
She lit a cigarette and drew heavily. Belatedly, she offered one to Forbes, who accepted. After all, it wasn’t his fault.
“I’ll make it. How did he do it?” she finally managed to ask.
“Very creatively,” Forbes said wryly. “I would say he ran the bathwater nice and warm, got in, made it as hot as he could stand it and then, as the hot water numbed his nerves, used an extremely sharp knife to slice open his wrists and then bled to death. There’s something that looks very much like a scalpel on the floor by the tub. The ancient Romans used to do something similar to commit honorable suicide.”
“Leave it to Walter to think of something like that,” she half sobbed. “He always did have a flare for the dramatic.”
“There was a suicide note,” Forbes added. “In it he said he’d been blackmailed by the Russians and he couldn’t stand the thought of being without his lover or going to prison.”
The FBI had found what they wanted, proof that there was a leak in the State Department. Now they would dig harder. She wanted to curse her poor dead boss, but couldn’t. His life must have been so tormented with the Russians coming at him from one direction and the FBI from another.
With a start, she realized that this was how Gromyko knew so much about her. Damn Barnes.
A car had pulled up outside the apartment, and she saw Agent Haven and another man come running up the stairs. Neither looked at her as they entered the apartment, and she realized she was no longer needed. She told Forbes she would take a cab and left. She would go home and not to work. Today had been long enough and she wasn’t ready for the stares and talk of the people in the office. The war had claimed another casualty and she had yet another friend to mourn.
It was time to write another letter to Steve. Of course she wouldn’t tell him about this. It might upset him and worry him, and she would never do that. Letters overseas should contain only happy news, comforting words. She could do it. She started crying again.
“Come back to me, Steve” she whispered.
CHAPTER 17
The supply trains began in the port of Cherbourg each day and originally consisted of twenty freight cars each. They ran to Paris, where they picked up more cars with more supplies and headed east. The trains were considered priority traffic and rolled along at a fairly high rate of speed. As they went, they used their whistles frequently to warn of their coming. As a result, someone with a sophomoric sense of humor had labeled the whole thing the “Toot Sweet Express.”
This time, the Toot Sweet train that swept toward Verdun and the French border with Germany also contained two squads of American soldiers under a young second lieutenant, John Travis. What used to be a milk run had turned potentially deadly, and Travis’s job was to protect the valuable train from attack by Soviet airplanes. For this purpose he had two flatcars with raised platforms carrying a pair of 20 mm antiaircraft guns each. He did not think it much of a deterrent. Darkness, he felt sincerely, was the best protection from the Reds.
Nor was Travis thrilled about the men he was commanding. Most of the ones in the security detachment had been culled from the stockades, where they had been serving time for various minor offenses, or from labor battalions where there was not a high premium paid for intelligence. Only his gunners seemed above average. He felt that all of them looked down on him.
Travis had doubts about himself. Only recently commissioned as a ninety-day wonder straight out of Officer Candidate School, he had never seen combat. Instead, he had been working in a personnel office in England when the call came for more officers to help free the truly qualified soldiers to fight the Russians.
Even though he had taken the express only a couple of times, the route was beginning to become familiar. He looked about through the grimy windows of the caboose and, even in the night, knew roughly where they were. He figured they were about twenty miles from the border and that the closer they came to Germany, the more danger there was from the air.
Travis put on his helmet, left the relative comfort of the caboose, and stepped over to the rearmost gun platform on the adjacent flatcar. It was also the only gun he could safely reach. He was not going to clamber over more than fifty freight cars to get to the first one just to be told that everything was fine. Instead, he depended on a walkie-talkie to communicate with both the sergeant in charge of the front gun and the train’s engineer.