by David Boyle
Xanthe did a double take. She thought it best to say yes.
The next problem which had arisen was around how much they would need to tell the great philosopher before they won his co-operation. They exchanged glances and began to outline the central issue. A piece of German equipment. A crucial component provided by a Swiss company. The Wittgenstein family trusts.
“May I ask what this piece of equipment is?”
Turing reddened.
“I am sorry, Professor, but…”
“It’s a chronometer,” Xanthe butted in, with an apologetic look at Alan.
“Ah. Of course it is. Now,” he turned on Turing. “You expected me to give you my trust, yet you do not trust me. That is a basic paradox, do you not think? A contradiction – and you know all about those, do you not, Turing!”
Turing turned to Xanthe to explain.
“The professor is referring to an argument we had a couple of years ago about the importance of contradictions to mathematics. You know the Entscheidungsproblem? All Cretans are liars, as a Cretan once told me: it goes round and round in circles.”
“No,” said Xanthe, “I don’t.”
“Bravo!” said Wittgenstein.
“Ah well, I said it was important. The professor said it was just silly. That was basically our disagreement.”
The professor smiled magnanimously.
“Don’t let us reopen old wounds, Turing. The fact remains that you will have to let me into your confidence a little, or I will be unable to help or advise.”
Xanthe felt a sudden wave of sympathy for the poor lonely genius across the café table.
“Listen, Professor. I have twice risked my life to protect the details of the secret, and other people do so every day. It isn’t that we don’t trust you; it’s that we’re not at liberty to divulge something that so many others believe – whether they are right or wrong to do so – is worth their lives. I’ve told you it’s a chronometer, and I don’t think we can elaborate further. But we do need your help. It is terribly important.”
Wittgenstein did a handbrake turn.
“Have you been to my seminars?” he said suspiciously. “I know Turing has, but have you?”
“Many years ago, I did once, Professor. I met Alan there. He found me a seat, which was kind of him. But I’m afraid…” – here was the admission she had not intended to make – “I don’t really think I’m a philosopher.”
Wittgenstein rubbed his hands together unexpectedly.
“That is what I wanted to hear. Wartime is no time for philosophy. You have, very sensibly in my view, abandoned study and found useful work. I have found it difficult to do so, but I have managed something, exhausting though it is. I am a dispensary porter, and by the time I finish work at five p.m., I am utterly drained. That is real work; so is yours, I feel sure.”
Now it was Turing’s turn. The smell of fried onions wafted across the room.
“What we are talking about here, Professor, is a system of serious ingenuity, which will give real power to the Nazi war effort, and we want to stop them if we possibly can, or at least delay them. What we are hoping is that you might write to your brother and ask him, beg him if necessary, to find some way of slowing down the production of this chronometer. Since he owns a large proportion of the company that’s making it.”
“Forgive me, I was under the impression that Switzerland was neutral.”
“Our understanding is that they continue to trade vital war materials with Germany as a way of warding off invasion. Sometimes you have to make a temporary accommodation with the devil to prevent a greater evil. You would agree with that, wouldn’t you?”
“You are right,” said the great man, his eyes clouding over, and a moment later, he was up and pacing around the café with great determination. The greasy gentleman behind the counter appeared unsurprised. Wittgenstein had evidently done this before.
“Professor,” said Xanthe hopefully.
“Oh dear,” whispered Turing, “I’m afraid I’ve upset the apple cart.”
As he paced, the air-raid siren went. The first for many months.
“Will you go to the shelter?” said the cook at the counter. “I won’t be going, so feel free to ride out the storm here if you prefer.”
Wittgenstein now had his head in his hands as he paced the room between the empty tables.
“Do you want to go down to the shelter?” said Turing.
“I’m staying here,” said Xanthe.
At that moment, the all-clear sounded.
“There we are. False alarm,” said the cook. He delivered Xanthe’s egg. It looked repulsive.
It also had a calming effect on Wittgenstein. He sat down again and began talking rather fast, with great animation.
“You no doubt refer to my own family, as you mentioned my brother?” he said. “You know that it was I – yes, it was I – who negotiated with the Nazis on their behalf, to save my sisters who still live in Vienna. It was I who agreed to pay the monsters six billion pounds. The majority of my father’s fortune. I did so, having long since given up any claim on the money. And yes, you are right, my brother, Paul, controls what remains. I cannot, in all conscience, ask him to do anything with the money since I have surrendered any benefit from it, or involvement with it. Nor will I do so. I have never asked him for money, and I never will. But I will help. I will write to him and introduce you, Miss Schneider, and say that you come bearing a letter from me, and that you will explain what it is you need. That is all I can do. I can ask him to listen to you; I cannot ask him to act.”
“And your brother lives in…”
“New York.” Wittgenstein finished the sentence. “Would you go there? That is what I suggest you do. If I ask him, he will see you, and he will listen. If you can give me some paper and a pen, I will write the letter here and now.”
Turing reached into his briefcase, and Xanthe’s mind raced. Could she leave Indy to go to America, even for a week or so? She had left him before without obvious ill effects, and she would love to go – she could not think of anything she would rather do, if they let her. But could she possibly get there and back in less than a fortnight, say? The crossing alone would take a week at least, and possibly more…
Wittgenstein appeared to be writing as if his life depended on it, with a furious intensity, bending the nib to breaking point, leaning forward obsessively. He seemed to be writing in German.
He signed the letter, sighed, looked up and smiled at Xanthe.
“There we are. Did you like your egg?”
Xanthe remembered how much the professor was said to value honesty, above the social niceties.
“Well, to be honest, I don’t much care for powdered egg.”
Wittgenstein’s brow darkened.
“Bosh,” he said.
*
“I’ll give you two some bits of advice,” said Fleming when he heard Xanthe had been given permission to fly across the Atlantic. “First, buy a flying suit: it is freezing cold at twenty thousand feet above the Arctic Circle. Second, if they offer you a sausage, say no. Mine was sixty-five per cent bread. It was like eating a hot dog with the roll inside the meat.”
“Where do I buy a flying suit?” asked Xanthe, unnerved.
Fleming was relishing his impact.
“Oh, they supply them and deliver them to the plane for you. But you must ask for one. You know what we Brits are like when it comes to comfort. They will send you off and let you happily freeze to death because they were embarrassed to mention it.”
It had been a whirlwind few days. There had been no time to consider things.
“America? Of course I would love to go, but I have a baby as you know, and I can’t take him,” she had said, as soon as they had left the café. Xanthe and Turing were talking as they walked back to the underground station after leaving Wittgenstein, who had shaken them both warmly by the hand, silently, in farewell.
“Well, I think you pretty much rescued that conversa
tion,” Turing had said. “It probably would have gone better if I hadn’t been there at all. How did you read the old monster so effectively?”
“I know, but…”
Air-raid sirens sounded again, and it was almost dark, even in the era of British Summer Time during the war. People were beginning to emerge from the surrounding slums and making their way in the same direction. There was the rattle of shutters coming down and the faint murmuring of people who were uncertain and nervous about what was to happen. She thought of the river glinting in the twilight, beckoning in its way fatally to the bombers.
“All I can say is that this is an urgent priority, and I feel sure we can fly you over, if necessary – if you can trust us again to look after your little boy,” Turing was saying as they walked a little faster. “Professor Wittgenstein has conceived a trust in you, not me, and – if he wants you to take his despatch to his brother – then that’s good enough for me.”
They had reached the platform of the Northern Line. The south London families had been hurrying to bring their bedding down to reserve a safe spot on the platform for the night. There was a budgie cage and an antimacassar and a number of thermos flasks. As they had descended the stairs, Xanthe had heard the first distant thuds of the bombs.
“And if it’s good enough for me, it is good enough for Commander Fleming,” said Turing definitively.
She was still a little surprised at how the professor had taken to her. She could only think it was because, actually, she had nothing to do with philosophy at all. It seemed to have done the trick.
Wittgenstein revealed that he had renounced his interest in the considerable family fortune and had promised to give no advice. So it would require a tough piece of persuasion on her part. She was far from sure she could manage it, but since the hint that she might, at last, be able to visit her home again, Xanthe had been increasingly convinced that she should go. She had imagined seeing her father again from the moment that Wittgenstein had set out the problem that needed to be solved.
What had been so odd about the meeting was that the professor seemed to behave in precisely the opposite way that she had expected. She imagined that he and Turing would understand each other so closely that she would have been the miserable outsider, pathetically begging to be let into the inner sanctum of the officially intelligent. In practice, it seemed to have been the other way around.
When they had emerged again, she had been staggered to see the wild eyes of the professor again seeking her out. “Fraulein!” he had shouted across the road. “I have rewritten the letter. I suggest that if he resists you, you mention the name ‘Kurt’. I have noted it down for you. It is a parallel case. He will know it.”
*
Now, with all the paperwork out of the way, she was on the runway, accompanied across the tarmac in Ayr by a good-looking RAF officer, having travelled up on the sleeper to Scotland. She asked again about the flying suit.
“Oh, I am sorry. Nobody mentioned that you wanted one. I’ll try and snaffle one for you and bring it along. Before we take off, of course,” he added gaily.
“What, in twenty minutes’ time?”
He gave her a hearty wave. But sure enough, after she had begun to make herself at home on one of the mattresses in the bomb bay of the Liberator bomber, he put his head up through the hole in the fuselage and handed over what looked like an enormous sleeping bag with legs.
“Oh yes, you’ll need that,” said the Canadian captain. “It can get pretty damn cold up there. Surprised nobody mentioned it before.”
It was the third time Xanthe had flown that year. She had hitched a ride in a diplomatic bomber on its way to Malta and Alexandria on her visit to Greece in April and come back the same way, each time along with officials and dignitaries who shared few words with her. This time, she was alone apart from the flight crew.
She took with her the thoughts which dominated her waking moments – of Indigo, being put to sleep in his cot with Nurse Agnes singing to him, as she ought to have been doing herself. Of her father, from whom she had not heard since Indy’s birth, her fears about him – whether he was angry with her, whether he was ill, or a host of other reasons why he hadn’t been in touch.
It had hurt her that her father had not been in contact. They had always got on so well before she had left for her strange experience at Simonetta College, Cambridge, which turned out to be more of a finishing school than a university, and before she had become so unexpectedly involved with British intelligence.
Once they had taken off, she struggled into her flying suit and began to feel warmer, and soon she could see they were over the Irish Sea and climbing.
“All right miss,” said the flight engineer. “You can come out of the bomb bay now. You can sit wherever you like in the plane. We’ll have sandwiches in a mo, and then I suggest you sleep. We’ll be in Newfoundland in eighteen hours, fingers crossed.”
He gave a little laugh to show this was intended as black humour.
Xanthe sat, trussed up in her flying suit, in the rear gunner’s position as the gloom over the British Isles began to engulf the view, heading towards the sunset and wondering how this particular mission was going to end. Had she really got the skill, all by herself, to persuade the great Wittgenstein family to act on behalf of the war effort? It was going to be tough.
Something about lying there in the padded suit reminded her of the story of the princess and the pea. She felt underneath the seat and pulled out a battered and abandoned copy of William Shirer’s Berlin Diary. So Bill had made it home. That, at least, was a comforting thought.
III
New York City, November 1941
“Mr Wittgenstein?”
“I am Dr Wittgenstein’s valet. How can I help you, ma’am?”
She had wondered if it had been a mistake not to make an appointment over the telephone. But she had not wanted to be put off, so she felt the most effective approach might be just to turn up at his home in the Upper East Side. Now she was here, via a yellow cab and a walk along Central Park, on these carefully manicured marble steps, she was less sure. London was hardly an egalitarian city, but something about the Blitz had rendered it more equal – and this very obvious wealth grated.
“I am here to meet him and have come to New York specifically to do so. I have a letter from his brother for him.”
“May I take the letter from you, ma’am? He is performing tomorrow and is very reluctant to be disturbed.”
The valet was clearly from Central Europe, probably an old functionary from the Wittgenstein Palace in Vienna. He wore a uniform that looked out of place in modern New York, black and frayed. The same with his white moustache.
“I’m afraid you don’t understand. The letter is a letter of introduction. I have been sent to see him by the British government, who I represent, and need to talk to him on a matter I can reveal only to him.”
Was that pompous enough? It was hard, she knew all too well, to generate the required gravitas to force your way into mansions like this when you are a twentysomething woman from the Midwest.
“Really, liebchen? You don’t sound British to me.”
The man was being so irritatingly patronising that she could have throttled him. You could see the cogs whirring in his secessionist brain.
Then he made a decision.
“Very well. But I must advise you to wait until after his concert tomorrow. If you would like to visit this house at twelve noon in two days’ time, I will make sure Dr Wittgenstein is aware of your visit.”
Two days? Fine, so be it. There was no point in ruining everything by pushing too hard. Also, two days gave her the chance to hop on a train to Cincinnati to find her father. She might not have another opportunity.
*
It had been thrilling to get nearer and nearer home. First the airstrip in Montreal, then the night train to New York and now the Cincinnati Limited sleeper to Cincinnati, arriving at 9.30 a.m. She would have one day to find her father.
New York seemed not to have changed a jot since she had sailed from there on the Aquitania back in 1938, just as the first war scare seemed to loom over Europe. Now, it was wonderful to fill her nostrils with the distinctive smell of an American sleeper, a strange combination of antiseptic, body odour and tobacco smoke, past the ever-present shoe-shine boys and the marshmallow stalls.
After the friendly smells and sounds of Union Terminal, nothing had prepared her for being home in Cincinnati. The sheer sweetness of it, the sense of liberty and sheer commercial power of it. And above all, the sense that nobody would drop bombs on you, the sense of civilisation – the absolute lack of sirens, except those of the police.
She took a cab to her home street and, her heart in her mouth, walked up the front drive. The house was clearly empty. She could see the pile of mail dimly through the dirty window, and there was an old, rain-drenched newspaper hanging out of the mailbox. Someone, at least, had transferred the mail inside. There were weeds on the front doorstep growing through cracks in the concrete.
“Xanth?” said a loud voice a few feet away. A large woman in slacks was emerging from the house next door. It was Auntie May.
“Oh wow, honey, is that really you? And looking so grown!”
Xanthe found the tears were rolling down her face. The anticipation and fear had become too much.
“Where is he, May? I haven’t got long, and I so need to see him. Is he alive? Where is he?”
May took her in her arms and stroked her hair as if she was still a girl.
“Oh, Xanthe. He is still with us. There’s been no passing, but you will find it hard. He has had a stroke and he’s in the St Vincent home. You know, on past Madison Road, up towards Evanston. You can walk there. I visit him every day, but usually, he doesn’t – I mean he sometimes finds it hard to know what’s what.”
“Oh, no,” said Xanthe, appalled. “Does he know? Does he know I have a child? He has a grandchild?”
“A baby? You had a baby? Did you get married, honey? Or was he a pilot who was killed? We hear such stories, you know. People here have changed their ideas about the war in Europe since the election, I know. Especially after the Reuben James went down last week. And the Kearsage, of course.”