Nihal then telephoned the Nazi-hunting agency, the Jewish Documentation Centre, conveniently situated here in Vienna, to find out about Weiland. Some years ago, Nihal had interviewed one of the few British scientists attached to the US Air Force team which had liberated the concentration camp at Nordhausen, where rocket parts were fabricated by Polish slave labour. This man had spoken movingly of the mounds of corpses, the starving and beaten prisoners, and the small children, conceived by raped camp workers, running round hungry and ill-clothed. Nihal believed that at least twenty thousand workers had died making the rockets. He recalled that this scientist had also been present at the interrogation of some of the scientists, including Wernher von Braun, he had a list somewhere of their names, and wondered if Weiland had been among them. At this time Nihal had also visited the massive bunker at Eperleques in the Pas de Calais, a huge German wartime factory for the assembly and launch of the V2 rocket. As he had trudged in the cold March rain round this grim, abandoned place, in which thousands of half-Jewish Germans, together with Polish, Belgian and Russian prisoners of war, had slaved and perished, his spirit had quailed. He had indeed felt it to be, as the monument at the entrance proclaimed, ‘One of the sacred places of human suffering.’
Weiland would now be in his eighties. Like von Braun, he had been a card carrying member of the Nazi party. For years, again like von Braun, he had worked with NASA and achieved acclaim. His presidency gave a certain prestige to RASAG, even if he played no active part, but it also linked it to this unsavoury past. But Nihal was puzzled. Under the UN Space Treaty, no private organisation could put a rocket into space. There was also the Missile Technology Control regime, by which Germany was bound. In fact, the whole thing was distinctly odd. The very idea of a private company selling cheap rocket technology to whoever wanted it was horrifying. If no-one knew about it yet, he thought, they certainly ought to.
Katie lay in bed with Bob. She tossed and turned, and couldn’t sleep. Her conscience tormented her, she had lied and wanted to confess to him, but she couldn’t. Anyway, what would be the point? It would simply hurt him, and there was no reason why he should know anything. She had resolved to end her relationship with Dmitry at once.
But how could she give this up? Why was sex so good with him, so much better than it had ever been with Bob? She didn’t understand it. She rolled over again, pulling the covers off Bob, and he grabbed them, impatiently.
‘What the hell is the matter with you? Can’t you let me sleep?’
She said, ‘No. I want sex.’
She had never said anything like this to him so simply and directly. He half sat up on one elbow, astonished.
‘Are you feeling okay?’
‘Don’t you want to?’
‘Well, of course, I always want to.’ He put his hand on her thigh, stroking her. She rolled onto her back, put his hands where she wanted them. He, obviously excited by this initiative, was already erect, getting ready to penetrate her. She pushed him back.
‘No, not yet… carry on like that.’
‘Like this?’
‘No, not exactly… here.’
It was impossible. He didn’t seem to understand what she wanted and it humiliated her to have to ask. She realised that she often pretended more pleasure than she felt in order not to hurt his feelings and that in the long run this hadn’t been good for them. Yet it hadn’t always been like this; she had sometimes wondered whether Bob was simply bored with her. She imagined, for a moment, being with Dmitry. Even thinking about him excited her.
Bob was inside her now, and she slipped her own hand down between them and made herself come. Once was not enough for her now; she went on, and he went on, and then in the end she came once again, with him; he lay still, on top of her, his arm vaguely stroking her arm, obviously puzzled.
After a while he rolled off her. He lay on his back, his eyes open.
Katie, feeling desperate, sat up, took his face in both her hands and forced him to look at her. ‘Bob, I’m so bored. I want to leave Vienna. Can’t you get another job?’
‘Why this, suddenly?’
‘Well, Lieselotte’s going, there’s nothing for me here and… oh I don’t know.’
‘As it happens I was thinking about trying something else. Give me time, I’ll see what I can do.’ He was silent for a few moments. ‘Is that the only reason?’
Katie lay back in the semi-darkness. ‘What other reason could there be?’ The question hung between them, the silence filled with tension. Katie felt her heart beating, afraid that he suspected something. She realised that she had never been truly intimate with Bob, had never really shared her inmost thoughts; she had always been aware of having to play a certain part, had never been able to let go and be herself, in case Bob disapproved of her. Now she was afraid to confront him, afraid of his reaction. This realisation was a shock; she had known Bob for years, had lived with him, had a child with him. How could she feel more intimate with a man she hardly knew, whose language and culture were entirely different?
She turned back to Bob, half intending to say something, but to her relief she found he was already asleep.
When Bob came home from work the next day he told Katie that it seemed Hans Müller had had a mistress. An anonymous woman with a Viennese accent had rung up the IAEA claiming that Müller had got her pregnant and demanding some form of compensation if they didn’t want her to publicise the fact. Apparently she had asked to speak to the DG, and when told this had not been possible she rang, separately, half a dozen people in the organisation, including the Director of Information and several people in Safeguards. She had sounded angry and distressed and had said vicious things about Müller. Everyone who had spoken to her had been shocked by her abusiveness; it had left a nasty taste in the mouth.
Katie too was dreadfully shocked. She turned the oven down so as not to ruin the supper and followed Bob into the living room. ‘Oh God,’ she said, ‘I hope Lieselotte doesn’t hear about it. Do you think it’s true?’ Bob shrugged. ‘Well, you never know what any of these people are up to on the side, do you?’ Katie turned away from him, unable to meet his gaze. The phone rang. It was Lieselotte, in great distress. She had just been phoned by the woman claiming to be Hans’s mistress. She had put Jochum to bed and finished packing her things; she was due to leave for Cologne in a couple of days. The woman, whoever she was, had said obscene things to her about what she and Müller had done together. Lieselotte could not bear to repeat them. She had wanted to hang up but had not felt able to; she had listened almost against her will because she had been so tormented by her imaginings that she thought anything would be bearable if only it were the truth.
The woman had said that if Lieselotte didn’t send her money she would give the story to the papers. Lieselotte had said that she would do no such thing and had hung up. Then the woman had phoned again. This time she had been in tears. She said that Müller had told her terrible lies. He had said he was going to leave his wife and hadn’t done so. He had promised her money to keep quiet. She had told him she wasn’t going to keep quiet. She had threatened Hans that she would tell his wife and he had told her if she did she would regret it.
Lieselotte had pleaded with her to stop, had said that it was destroying her, that she did not believe her, and that she could not be talking about her husband. She had said she was going to ring the police and if she called again she would have them trace the call. She had hung up; the woman hadn’t called back again.
‘The trouble is, I really can’t believe her,’ said Lieselotte. ‘Perhaps I am naive, but I just can’t believe it. Not Hans, not with a woman who sounds like that.’
Katie didn’t know what to say. Would Bob react the same way, if he found out what she had been doing? She struggled to think of something sensible, something which would calm her friend, but she couldn’t. ‘Have you told the police?’
Lieselotte said, ‘Yes, I called them. They said they would send someone round.’ Her voice suddenly w
ent flat.
‘Do you want me to come over?’ asked Katie.
‘No,’ said Lieselotte, ‘No, it’s all right. My sister is here. We’re going on Wednesday. I’ll write to you. I knew you would hear about it from the office, I just wanted you to hear it first from me.’
Katie said her goodbyes, hung up and went back into the kitchen. Bob was standing there, staring out of the window.
Katie asked, ‘Bob, do you think it’s true?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘But you worked with Hans.’
‘Well, I didn’t know him that well. It’s possible, of course, when people are away so much, of course it is.’
‘Have you been unfaithful?’ The words escaped her before she could stop herself; she was horrified, afraid he would turn the question back on her. But instead he laughed. He turned to her and embraced her. ‘Is that what’s worrying you? No, of course not, honey. Why should I be, when I have you?’
When Dmitry heard the story from Hilde he felt somehow disgusted with everything. He didn’t know what to think. Of course, if people were prepared to cover up something, if they were prepared, in an extreme case, to murder someone to silence them, they were not likely to shrink at paying some woman to lie and make an unpleasant scene like this to make it seem as if there had been a personal reason for the suicide. All the same, to destroy someone’s image of their dead husband seemed the ultimate in cruelty. But then – perhaps he was completely wrong. It could be true. Didn’t he himself know what emotional messes people could get into, people who on the surface were conventional, reliable. Why shouldn’t this be true of Müller? He sat at his desk and stared at the wall in front of him. He wished again that he hadn’t rung Eduardo Cruz.
He tried to think clearly. He couldn’t be sure what was imagined and what was real. Everything was an impression; the expression on the face of Oliveira at the Valadares centre when he had said they had nothing to hide; the look in Müller’s eyes when he had asked Dmitry if he could talk to him later at the hotel in São Paulo; the tone in Cruz’s voice over the telephone. Did you know these things, or were they just imagined? He thought probably you knew. He had known that Katie wanted him from the first minute he had seen her, probably before she had realised it herself. He was usually right about people. Perhaps he should simply trust his instincts.
On the other hand, what could he do? He was never going to be able to prove anything. His first impulse had been to go and see the DDG again and tell him about this latest detail, but he knew that he would be in trouble for having spoken to Lieselotte, and he was already aware that he had made himself unpopular by repeatedly voicing his doubts about what had happened. Besides, it had revealed nothing. As far as Lascalles was concerned the business was closed.
Dmitry sighed. Of course, if there were a problem in Brazil, it could be sorted out behind the scenes without the IAEA ever getting wind of it. It was unlikely that the Brazilian military could get away with anything they might be doing for long. If something was going on, it was likely that the Brazilian authorities would discover it before the IAEA. They would simply sort things out internally. They would say there had been problems with their accounting, that sort of thing. The IAEA turned a blind eye to minor safeguards transgressions all the time. Or perhaps somebody could, behind the scenes, ask the head of the Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission to look into it. Perhaps he would mention this to the DDG.
Dmitry walked across the room and stared out of the window at the city lying under a thin layer of snow. The whole history of Brazil’s parallel programme had been a maze of deception. In 1986 the military had gained greater control of the parallel programme when CNEN had been put under the direct authority of the National Security Council, which was made up of the President and heads of the armed forces, instead of the Ministry of Mines and Energy. When austerity measures had curbed spending on Brazil’s nuclear programme, secret bank accounts had been set up abroad to make sure the military programme did not suffer. Various top nuclear energy officials in Brazil had acknowledged that they had been involved in clandestine trade to build the Valadares plant. This included declaring false end uses for German lathes for machining cylinders for gas centrifuges. The former chairman of CNEN had even publicly revealed that Brazil had obtained a wide variety of nuclear equipment by mislabelling them as ‘tractor parts’ in the shipping documents.
Dmitry sat down at his desk again and rested his face in his hands. Everybody was aware of this. People had known about it for years. There had been criticisms of the whole West German nuclear deal; the US in particular had warned them against it, saying there was no guarantee that Brazil would not use the imported expertise for military uses. But since Brazil had not then acceded to the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty there had been nothing much that could have been done about it by the IAEA. In a way, it was almost funny. It was farcical. You could shrug your shoulders about it and get on with the job and hope that nothing would come of it; indeed, hope, as seemed to be the case in Brazil, that governments would see sense and decide against the bomb for their own financial and political reasons. It was all right somehow as long as individuals did not come into it. But if things had got to the point where people were prepared to kill to cover up such goings-on, if a safeguards agreement was being deliberately and cynically breached, everything suddenly appeared quite different.
And why shouldn’t they be prepared to kill? Enormous sums of money were at stake in nuclear trade. The military were already up to their necks in clandestine deals. There had been a long history of corruption. Perhaps one or two people had been bumped off already, in Brazil; little people who didn’t matter. Perhaps a technician who had been prepared to talk had had an accident, been run over by a car or that sort of thing. Nobody would know or care about it. He knew it only mattered so much to him because he knew Hans Müller personally, had met and liked his distraught young wife.
The phone rang. Dmitry almost jumped, startled. He picked it up. It was Nihal, reporting on what he had found. Dmitry listened for a long time in silence. When Nihal had finished, he stayed silent for so long that Nihal had to ask him if he was still there.
Dmitry reached across his desk for his cigarettes. He thought for a moment, wondering whether it was necessary to say this, and then deciding, on balance, that it was best if he did. ‘By the way, Nihal, this is important – you won’t tell anyone I suggested you look into this, will you?’
Katie, again, heard nothing from Dmitry. After a few days she could bear it no longer. She dropped Anna off early at kindergarten and rushed back to his flat, hoping to catch him before he left for work.
She waited for what seemed a long time before he answered the door. He was unshaven, wearing his dressing gown. He started, surprised to see her, and stood for a moment staring at her. Then he said, abruptly, ‘Come in.’
She walked into the room. Some music was playing quietly: some Beethoven string quartet, she recognised it from a long time ago. It was cold in the flat, as if the heating hadn’t yet come on. He didn’t say anything to her at once; for a moment she felt terribly uncomfortable, afraid that she might have disturbed him at a time when he wouldn’t welcome it, or even, the thought crossed her mind for an instant, was with another woman.
She said, ‘I thought I owed you an explanation.’
‘What for?’
She looked at him. Within seconds they were kissing one another; within minutes they were in bed. It was too cold for either of them to want to get up afterwards. It had started to snow outside; the curtains were drawn back but it was still quite dark inside the room. He switched the bedside light on. They lay together in the small circle of light it cast, which emphasised the darkness all around them; he put his arm around her shoulder.
With his free arm, slightly awkwardly, he reached over to get a cigarette.
‘Do you have to smoke so much? Doesn’t it worry you, that it’ll kill you?’
Dmitry turned and looked at her. ‘W
ell, for you, I will try to smoke less. But this one, I must have.’ He lit up and inhaled deeply. Leaning against him, Katie felt suddenly relaxed, intimate.
After a while she said, ‘You must tell me about yourself. I don’t know anything about you.’
‘So you want my life story, do you?’ He looked at the clock. ‘Well, I don’t have to be in till ten. Maybe there’s time to at least begin.’
He began to talk, slowly, slightly hesitantly, as if finding it hard to find the words to say in English things he had never before expressed in that language, perhaps even in his own. He told her about his father’s death when he was eight; how things had been hard for them; how he had been determined to excel at school. He had worked hard at science because he was good at it, but also at languages, because it had been his dream to travel abroad. He achieved a gold medal at school and went to Moscow State University where he was a serious student, preoccupied with work. There he had his first serious girlfriend; she was from Cuba. She used to teach him Spanish. He had long ago lost touch with her. He had also met his wife, Masha, there though he hadn’t actually gone out with her or married her until much later.
Katie asked, tentatively, ‘What went wrong with your marriage?’ but he answered vaguely. They were wrong for one another. Katie must know what goes wrong with marriages – what had gone wrong with her own? It was not anybody’s fault. Masha had not liked his work. Of course he had worked in secret research establishments; the Russians were absolutely obsessed with secrecy, and for her this was not easy. Well, what else was there to say? His life had been very boring. His career had followed a logical progression. He had worked hard, but had never particularly excelled at anything. If he had, he wouldn’t have come to Vienna. The Russians didn’t like to let their top scientists go abroad.
The Rocket Man Page 6