While Claire hops up and down the aisles, Mr. March conducts the class as it sings: “‘Here comes Peter Cottontail, hopping down the bunny trail …’” She pauses at each desk and deposits a chocolate egg. Madeleine feels hot at the pit of her stomach, her palms are moist, her fingers cold. She places them against her forehead to cool it.
She feels better by the time Claire gets to her desk, because everyone is being kind to the bunny, thanking her, even patting her. Claire’s charm bracelet gleams as she hands Madeleine the egg, and Madeleine remembers her own bracelet sitting scorned in the blue box at home. Perhaps she should wear it to Brownies tonight. She takes the egg and whispers out of the side of her mouth, “Thanks, doc, us wabbits gotta stick together,” and the bunny smiles.
“All good things must come to an end,” says Mr. March, and Claire hops back to his desk with the empty basket. “Did the Easter bunny remember to save an egg for herself?” he asks. The bunny shakes her head. “Why ever not?” he says.
Claire looks down and murmurs, “I only like the real kind,” in her soft sweet accent.
“Of course,” says Mr. March. “How could I forget: our resident ornithologist.” He scans the class and says, “Then who, pray tell, was the lucky recipient of two chocolate eggs?”
Gordon Lawson raises his hand, smiles and shrugs. The whole class goes, “Ohhhhhh!” and both Gordon and Claire blush. Auriel whispers to Madeleine that Marjorie looks as though she has just sucked a lemon, not a chocolate, and it’s true, she does.
“Aren’t you going to eat your chocolate egg, little girl?”
Madeleine looks at the coloured tinfoil oval on her desk. “No thank you, Mr. March.”
“And why not? Am I a stranger?” Obliging laughter from the class.
“No.”
“Well?”
“I gave it up for Lent.”
“Oh. We have a devout Christian in our midst.” More laughter. “I’m not aware of having said anything amusing,” he says, looking around. “Your self-discipline is admirable, Miss McCarthy, but Easter is just a few days away. What’s wrong with celebrating the occasion with your classmates?” She swallows. He says, “Methinks you are splitting hairs.” He waits, then rolls his eyes. “That was a pun. Hairs, h-a-i-r-s, or hares, h-a-r-e-s.” Tentative laughter. “And what do we call two words that sound alike but mean different things? Miss McCarthy?”
“Twins.”
“Incorrect.” He writes the answer on the blackboard, which makes his bum jiggle. “Homophones.” He underlines it, then turns to face them. “Class?”
All: “Homophones.”
Philip Pinder shouts, “Homo-phones!”
Few people laugh because few get it.
“Jeez,” says Auriel as they spill out the side door, “whoever heard of getting in trouble for not eating chocolate?”
“Yeah, that’s religious prosecution,” says Lisa.
“Hey you guys,” says Madeleine, “want to roll all the way home?”
But they can’t. Lisa and Auriel have band practice. Madeleine rolls like a runaway log, as fast as she can, because tonight at seven o’clock in the schoolyard the Brownies are flying up to Guides. There will be refreshments and parents, Miss Lang’s fiancé will be in attendance, and if she hurries and changes into her play clothes right now, then rushes back, she will be able to help set up the giant toadstool and benches, and roll out the carpet of yellow crêpe paper that she and her friends have come to think of as the “golden pathway.”
In the vestibule of Fried’s apartment building the buzzer sounds. Jack hurries across the lobby, unchanged but for the addition of a new Look magazine. The cover catches his eye: two photos side by side—Fidel Castro and the Canadian flag—or rather, ensign.
The elevator begins its glacial ascent and Jack wishes he had taken the stairs. He manoeuvres his wrist around the grocery bag and peers at his watch: three-fifteen. The shopping took longer than he expected; he had to wait in line while the Bavarian shopkeeper and his wife chatted with each and every customer. Jack was fuming but contained his impatience so as not to draw attention. As it is, he will have to find a way to keep Mimi from the market for a week or two—long enough for the shopkeepers not to remark, “Back already? Your husband was just here,” yet not so long that they’ll say, “We haven’t seen you since before your husband came in.” How do people conduct extramarital affairs? They become travelling salesmen.
On the third floor, Jack walks along the swirly carpet toward the end of the hall. He planned to get a drive with McCarroll, but when he went to find him, the clerk said McCarroll was not expected home until the dinner hour. Simon was unconcerned by the delay in briefing McCarroll. He said Fried was in no immediate danger as long as he stayed in his apartment. “The chap who saw him hasn’t a clue where to look for him.”
Jack wondered how Simon could be so sure, but wasn’t going to lose any sleep over it—he had other problems, chief among them transport. Jack had assumed that he wouldn’t need the Rambler so Mimi had taken it into Exeter for groceries this afternoon and—what else?—to take Sharon McCarroll to get her hair done because her husband was coming home this evening. Well, there was the information about the exact timing of McCarroll’s return, if only he had known how to decode it. He reflected on the vigour of the female grapevine, wondering if any man had ever managed to tap its potential.
Jack had turned his steps toward the ME section, intending to sign out a staff car, only to find that the entire fleet had been pressed into service for the visiting air vice-marshal. The flight sergeant in charge told him, “Squadron Leader Boucher is heading into town for a meeting, sir, if you run you might catch him.” Jack didn’t run. He could not begin to imagine the web of petty deceit he would have to weave to convince Vic that he too had a meeting—not at the university, of course, that was where Vic was going—where? With whom? Someone Vic had never heard of? What was more, he was irritated by his own irrational certainty that Vic was then bound to catch him at the market with an armload of guilty groceries. He had already become more finely attuned to Vic’s manner since the “caviar and cherries” incident—trying to assess whether Vic thought he had lied to his wife. A midday trip to London on a flimsy pretext … Vic would surely tell Betty.
He left the ME section, sweating by now in his woollen uniform—too hot a day for April—and had just decided to scrub the journey into town altogether when a black staff car rolled up alongside him and a military policeman inquired if he needed a lift. The MP would not be returning until late that evening, and with a full car at that, “so I can only offer you a one-way ticket, sir.”
“I’ll take it,” said Jack, and hopped in the back. A stroke of luck. He had just remembered Fried’s Ford Galaxy. He could drive it back to Centralia. “What’s your name, corporal?”
“Novotny, sir.”
A bruiser of a fellow. Jack sat back and asked him who he liked for the Stanley Cup this year.
Now, Jack knocks at Fried’s door. And waits. Finally, the shuffling, the pause during which he feels Fried’s eye on him through the peephole. Slide of the safety chain, thunk of the deadbolt and the door opens. Fried turns without a word back toward his darkened living room and the blare of the television. The odour of stale tobacco greets Jack. He would love to go straight to the window and open it but light is verboten on account of Fried’s orchids—vampire orchids, as Jack thinks of them. There are five now, growing up their coat hangers, dark delicate flesh, thriving.
Jack dumps the bags on the kitchen counter. In order to shop today, he had to get another advance on his pay. He has to hope that Mimi doesn’t question the old “accounts-payroll mistake” excuse when she sees the double deposit on payday. At least he needn’t worry about lipstick on his collar.
Jack has never considered adultery. Now it crosses his mind unbidden, because of the absurd situation in which he finds himself—sneaking away from work in the middle of the day, purchasing luxury items in secret, keeping a furt
ive rendezvous in dim rented rooms. As he puts away groceries in the refrigerator glow of Fried’s tiny kitchen, he finds himself picturing sex with a woman not his wife—right here in this cramped kitchen. Up against the counter. He takes the cognac from the bag, sticks it in the cupboard next to an identical half-full bottle, annoyed and now inconveniently aroused. He is conducting a clandestine affair. With NATO.
Jack walks back into the living room. Fried is watching Secret Storm. Jack shakes his head; after all, you have to laugh. He would love to tell Mimi about Fried, she’d get a kick out of it, and one day soon maybe he will be able to. A commercial comes on for Ban deodorant but Fried doesn’t take his eyes from the screen. Jack feels suddenly, oddly affectionate toward him. This is the last time he will see the man before he leaves to start working for USAF—and eventually, if Fried gets his way, NASA. He is a true eccentric, and what he lacks in charm, he clearly makes up for in courage and commitment. It’s been a slice, Jack wants to say. “How about a game of chess, sir?”
Fried appears at first not to have heard him. Then, as noxious strains of organ music signal the resumption of the soap opera, he says, “Shhh.”
Jack is stung. He feels himself flush and he takes a quiet breath. He would like to come away from this mission with more than a sour taste and a lot of unanswered questions. Fried’s profile looks imperturbable in the light and shadow of the television. A woman’s voice stutters, “Because I—I’m … the other woman,” and she breaks down weeping.
This is Jack’s last chance. The next time he sees Fried, it will be with Blair McCarroll, and after that he will likely never see the man again. So he says, “Too bad von Braun didn’t pick you to come to America with him in ’45, you’d be at NASA by now.”
Fried turns his head and glares. Bingo. He forms his words with unexpected precision and fluency. “You know where is Kazakhstan? You know what is Baikonur? You know who is Helmut Gröttrup?” He raises his voice above the tears and recriminations on the screen. “We are years ahead, we launch, we orbit, we beat you and do you know why?” He gestures with disgust toward the television. “Because you care more for this than you care for that,” and he points at the ceiling. Jack assumes he is referring to the moon, and the cosmos in general. “The Soviets come when the war ends. With guns we are ordered to them and we work—” Thin cords stand out in Fried’s neck.
Jack sits down, carefully, as though trying to avoid waking someone—
“They take me and many others.”
Jack has guessed right: Fried didn’t make the first cut. At the end of the war, Wernher von Braun had the good sense to flee the Russian advance and surrender to the Americans, who had the good sense to recruit him. Von Braun had hand-picked his team from among those he had worked with on the German rocket program—including his brother, along with his managerial right hand, Arthur Rudolph—the brightest and the best, who now form the core of NASA. But he didn’t pick Fried, and Fried fell into the hands of the Russians. Fried must have had a lot to prove in the Soviet Union.
Fried continues. “Gröttrup also is a scientist from Dora. He is of high rank. Not only von Braun knows how to make V-2, Gröttrup knows, I know. We work in the Soviet Union, many of us, and no luxury. Not like America.” He mutters at the man and woman on the screen, entangled in an illicit embrace. “I have been the only German left now in the Soviet Union program. They dispose—how do you say …?”
“Kill?”
“Nein,” says Fried impatiently, displaying more animation in one moment than Jack has witnessed in months, “throw away. Like garbage. They say, ‘We have Russians now to do your job.’”
“Ah,” says Jack, “Struck Off Strength.”
“Wie?”
“Like obsolete—worn out—aircraft. Tossed aside.”
“Just so. Tossed aside.”
“Except for you.”
“Ja.” Fried nods, his lower lip rising to displace the upper in a show of determination or self-satisfaction.
“Why, Oskar?”
Fried jabs his own narrow chest, where grey hairs stray from the open neck of his shirt. “I work. I watch the others. I see when there is sabotage, I know who is a traitor.” His face is taut.
“But you’re a traitor now.”
Fried takes a deep breath but makes no move. Finally he says, “I don’t care for money. If you have made something for your whole life, you wish only to continue. To work with the best. I do not care who wins this race to the moon. I care to participate. Russians will not allow me to go farther. By them I am always a foreigner.”
Jack nods, somewhat touched by Fried’s honesty. He says gently, “You must have made a major contribution to the Soviet space program.” Fried betrays no emotion, but Jack can tell that, like a child, he has heard and is savouring. “No wonder the Soviets leapt ahead,” Jack adds deliberately, “what with scientists of your calibre working for them.” Fried leans forward and switches off the TV. Reaches for his pipe. Jack hands him the fresh pouch of tobacco. “You fellas were launching Sputnik while we were still blowing up on the test stand.”
Fried shrugs—expressionless, delighted—and lights his pipe, passing the flame back and forth across the bowl, puffing.
“I guess you’re looking forward to seeing some of your old friends down there, eh? There’s bound to be some familiar faces at Wright-Patterson Air Base … over in the R and D facility?”
Fried says nothing. Maybe he doesn’t know where he’s going any more than Jack does.
Jack says, “Not to mention Houston.”
Fried smokes, calm once more.
“Did you know von Braun?”
“Natürlich.”
“At Peenemünde?”
“And after, at Dora. He would come to inspect.”
Jack recalls reading somewhere that von Braun always made a point of visiting the shop floor at the U.S. Army Ballistic Missile Agency. A visionary with a feel for hardware. “So you worked right in the factory. What did you do?”
“I am the superior to make certain the rocket is properly builded,” says Fried.
“You oversaw production standards.”
“You can say this.”
“So you helped manufacture the actual rocket. The V-2.”
Fried nods. Jack gets a chill. “Wow.”
“This is a beautiful machine.”
Jack nods. “Hitler’s ‘secret weapon.’” He wants to smile broadly—he has waited so long for this.
“Guidance and control,” says Fried, “this is like the brain of the machine. Delicate. It is taken years. The rocket is fifteen point two metres long, perfect mixture for fuel, this also is taken years. We produce three hundred each month, but they are not all perfect. The SS does not know what is needed properly to produce this rocket.”
“The SS?”
“This rocket could have winned the war.”
Jack knows enough not to argue—the V-2 could never have won the war for Hitler, regardless of how efficiently they were produced. The world’s first ballistic missile was an effective instrument of terror, but in terms of destructive power it was conventional ordnance. A glorified artillery shell. Hitler would have had to have a parallel track of atomic research going, then married the nuclear bomb to the V-2 rocket. Jack recalls what Froelich said—that Hitler rejected atomic research on the grounds that it was “Jewish science.”
But Fried is probably like Wernher von Braun, whose passion for rockets was born of the dream of space travel. He couldn’t have cared less about weapons. “Do you think we’ll do it, Oskar? Will Americans get to the moon and back within the decade?”
Fried taps his pipe. “Is possible. If Soviets do not arrive first.”
“Yeah, but we’ve got you now.” Jack grins and sees Oskar Fried smile for the first time. “Maybe that’s who spotted you at the marketplace?” He can see Fried clam up again but he presses on. “An old colleague? Maybe an engineer who worked for you?”
Fried shakes his head, no.
“I thought you said you didn’t know who he was?”
Fried takes the bait. “I do not know who, I know what.”
“Oh,” says Jack innocently. “Well, Simon says this fella doesn’t know your name so what’s the problem? Maybe he just wanted to say hello—”
“He wants to put a rope about my neck.” Fried has gone pale. He taps out his pipe.
Jack says gently, “Why, Oskar? What did you do?”
“My job.” Fried gets up, takes a spray bottle from the windowsill and begins spritzing his flowers.
Jack was unable to get more out of him. Now, as he walks down the stairwell, he runs his finger along the serrated edge of Fried’s car key in his pocket. “Simon asked me to move it,” he lied. He heads out the side door of the building and squints against the blaze of afternoon, wondering, why should Fried be afraid that he will be hanged for the job he did? He was a scientist. He worked on the V-2, so did Wernher von Braun and half of NASA. Fried has laboured under the pitiless scrutiny of GRU—the Soviet secret police—for the past seventeen years. If he’s paranoid, perhaps it’s because he is like a bird that has been caged for too long—the door is open, but he has no idea he can fly out. Freedom takes getting used to. Like daylight for a miner. Fried would know, having worked underground at the rocket factory, and now Jack understands the orchids; they thrive in darkness. As he rounds the building, he feels a twinge of compassion. He finds the Ford Galaxy parked in back between two Dumpsters, gets in and checks his watch. It’s just after four.
Earlier, at three-fifteen, Colleen and Madeleine are in the schoolyard along with several other children and adults.
“What do you want to do now?” asks Madeleine. Colleen is leaning against the bike rack. Madeleine is sharpening a Popsicle stick on the ground.
“I don’t know,” says Colleen, “what do you wanna do?”
“I dunno. Wanna go to Rock Bass?”
“Maybe.”
Across the schoolyard, Cathy Baxter and a number of other girls are busily helping Miss Lang prepare for the flying-up ceremony that will take place after supper. Glancing over at Colleen, Madeleine tries to quell her excitement.
The Way the Crow Flies Page 41