The Murder of a Fifth Columnist Read Online Free

nothing, I’m not quite sure—“I think Colonel Primrose regards the Army as flexible and highly efficient.”
    “Then he’d be a fool!” Corliss Marshall snapped. “And he’s not. Look what the Army did to Billy Mitchell. Look at the situation now. We ought to have had the draft five years ago.”
    “Yes?” Pete said, a little dangerously. “And what have you done? Did you raise a storm when Billy Mitchell bit the dust? Wasn’t it you, Marshall, that said we didn’t need the draft? And didn’t you go to town on the disarmament conference and plump for scrapping the Navy? I won a prep school debate by learning a column of yours by heart once. And what are you scared of now? You’re too old to fight. What makes you figure the rest of us have lost our guts just because you’ve lost yours?”
    Corliss Marshall trembled with rage. “Because the safety of the country’s in the hands of white-livered puppies like you—and you!” he shouted. He pointed from Pete to Larry Villiers, who didn’t, I must admit, look as if he’d ever been much good defending anything but a very upper-class drawing room hearth.
    Pete’s mouth went a shade harder.
    “Be careful how inclusive you are, Marshall,” he said quietly.
    Larry Villiers, still slumping elegantly back in the corner of the sofa, had merely looked surprised when Corliss’s finger shot out at him. At this almost gratuitous insult from Pete, everything about him changed… but without his ever moving a muscle or varying the slow almost catlike movement of his hand as he raised his cigarette to his lips and let the smoke trickle slowly out of the corner of his mouth. I wouldn’t have wanted Larry Villiers to hate me like that, I thought.
    He flicked his cigarette into the fireplace and lighted another, saying nothing.
    It seemed to me that it was getting unpleasantly warm in the room, and there was a detached glint in the eyes of Señor Delvalle as he followed this argument that didn’t look very hopeful for hemispheric solidarity.
    “—Why don’t you let the War and Navy Departments take care of it?” I asked. “And tell me something that’s in your field. Who is it that writes ‘Truth Not Fiction’?”
    If cooling off the room had been my idea, it was certainly successful. It was just as if I’d dropped a Molotov breadbasket of dry ice squarely in the middle of it. The silence was deafening. The faces of the four newspaper men went completely frozen.
    Senor Delvalle looked at me with admiration.
    “I have often wondered that myself, Mrs. Latham,” he said.
    Nobody answered him either. It was the first time in my life that I’d seen Corliss Marshall, Pete Hamilton, Larry Villiers and Sylvia Peele—en masse or any one of them separately—silent on any subject.
    “I saw a copy of it today,” Kurt Hofmann said, apparently unaware that an unusual situation had developed. He let his monocle fall and slide down his starched shirt-front. “I applaud every effort of the press to keep America aroused. You are too soft. You stir yourselves every four years, and drop back to sleep again.”
    “What we need is a Strong Opposition,” Effie Wharton said sharply. She sounded exactly like the chorus in a Greek play.
    I could see what Sylvia meant all right. It wasn’t because she didn’t like the way the country was being run—it was because she and Sam weren’t helping run it any more.
    Kurt Hofmann glanced at her.
    “America is becoming a decadent nation,” he went on, as if he hadn’t been interrupted really. “Look what happened when an obscure infant-prodigy playwright broadcast a supposed attack from Mars. It is the duty of you gentlemen of the Press… and ladies”—he bowed to Sylvia sitting beside Larry, and put his glass back in his eye—“to hold constantly before your country the danger it is in by its failure to have adequate arms, and its lack of moral preparedness, and its class struggle, and the wastefulness of its