Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  Von Niehauser decided that he was hungry.

  There was an Italian restaurant located in a cellar on West Twelfth Street. The Italians had recently defected from the Axis, but it had been the sensible thing to do and von Niehauser saw no reason to hold a grudge. He descended the staircase and was met by the heavy smells of tomato sauce and garlic.

  A waiter wearing a white jacket and an apron that reached within a few inches of the floor showed him to a table, and he ordered veal and pasta and a small green salad and a bottle of Asti. Against the back wall was a framed print of Garibaldi.

  He was halfway through the meal before it occurred to him to reflect on his own callousness. By now he was probably being actively hunted by the police—how long, really, could he expect them to remain fooled?—and less than five hours before he had killed a man, and neither, apparently, had had any effect on his appetite. The condition, of course, was not new. In Russia death and danger had been around him constantly and, like everyone else, he had felt little enough inclination to starve himself. It is only the novelty of these things which makes them upsetting; after a while, one begins hardly to notice.

  About Stafford he cared nothing at all. Stafford had invited his own death. It had been a matter of simple self-protection.

  “I was scared—I was just gonna turn myself in. I wouldn’t of told ’em anything about you, honest.”

  Von Niehauser hadn’t had to say a word. All that was necessary was to walk in the door and look at him, and Stafford had begun confessing his sins, pleading for forgiveness as if it were some minor matter of personal trust between them. He had made a disgusting sight. Von Niehauser had killed him, as much as anything, simply to make him hold his tongue.

  Hitler was right about that—they were all soldiers now. A soldier breaks faith and must pay for it with his life, and that ends the matter. In a conflict such as this, no one had a right to consider his own survival. That had been Stafford’s offense, to imagine that he could possibly matter.

  There was a cat which apparently belonged to the restaurant, since it worked its way from table to table with perfect impunity. Von Niehauser never even noticed the creature until he felt it rubbing its back along the bottom of his right trouser leg. He took a few strands of spaghetti that carried a taste of the Bolognese sauce and held them low underneath the tablecloth, as if it were the most guilty action of his life. In a few seconds he could feel the cat’s rough tongue licking his fingers. The experiment was such a success that he cut off a tiny piece of his veal cutlet and offered that as well.

  For dessert he ordered zabaione and a cup of the thick, sweet coffee favored by the Italians. The taste of the Marsala was almost like the ache of longing.

  In 1933, the summer before his mother died, he had taken the train down to Viareggio, where she could have the warmth and the sea air that his father believed might save her life. He had been twenty-four and almost at the end of his training at the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. They had already offered him a Privatdozentur, to be taken up as soon as he had finished his dissertation. He was to be a theoretical physicist and could afford to ignore the sordid concerns of politics. Hitler seemed to matter very little.

  But that had been all his father had wanted to talk about—what was happening in Berlin, what it all might mean for the Army. He remembered thinking how boring it all was, wondering how his father could possibly concern himself with this new government which was so obviously bound to collapse within the next half year.

  And his mother would sit on the veranda of the house they were renting and look out over the beach and the sea beyond. She was forbidden coffee, but a little wine was supposed to be good for her and there was a place in the next street that served a particularly delicious zabaione of which she was very fond.

  “Enjoy yourself, my dear,” his father would murmur to her across the table. “It will give you strength—put the roses back in your cheeks.” And his eyes would have an anxious, haunted look that von Niehauser had never seen there before. She was wasting away right in front of them.

  And in the late afternoon, he and his father would put on white trousers and stroll along the breakwater. Somehow his father always looked uncomfortable in mufti, as if he were conscious of having assumed a disguise.

  “I don’t know,” he would say, his hands clasped behind his back in a way that would have revealed to anyone that he was a member of the Prussian officer caste. “I received a letter from Blomberg a few weeks ago, and Blomberg thinks very highly of him. He says the new regime will be good for the Army.”

  “And, after all, there is still President Hindenburg.”

  “Hindenburg is a senile husk who is completely under the spell of his son Oskar. You mustn’t look in that direction.” And the general smiled and put a hand on his youngest boy’s shoulder. “You should spend less time with your precious particles, Joachim, and live more in the world. Hindenburg—what an idea!”

  All of that seemed so very long ago, more than a single lifetime. His mother had never wanted him to be a soldier. “You are too sensitive,” she would say. “Leave it to Kurt and Egon; they haven’t your eye for things. The Army would be the death of you.” And now his mother and father and Kurt and Egon were all dead, and he was a soldier after all. Ten short years and a whole world had been swept away. It had been longer than a single lifetime.

  Von Niehauser sat lingering over his coffee, in no hurry to be finished. What did he have to hurry him along except a renewal of his difficulties with the police? Earlier in the week he had studied a map of Manhattan, considering all possible avenues of escape should his presence be discovered, and he could only assume that by this time they had all been effectively sealed. The SS had not done well in settling on New York as his first place of refuge. It would seem that he was trapped.

  However, there were always limits to the power and imagination of the police. Even in Hitler’s Germany, where they enjoyed unlimited opportunities for the perfection of their art, they had proved unable to arrest everyone who was found obnoxious to the regime. It was well known that political dissidents for whom the Gestapo had fingerprints and photographs on file had still, in some cases, managed to evade capture for months at a time. Why should the Federal Bureau of Investigation fare any better than the Gestapo? In a democracy, one supposed, they had less practice.

  It had been a pretty, feminine voice that had answered him when he called the number Stafford had written out on that slip of paper. “Federal Bureau of Investigation,” she had said. Von Niehauser had never heard of such an organization, but at least now his pursuers had a name.

  Perhaps he could simply wait them out, go into hiding for a few weeks until they lost interest or assumed he had slipped past them. It was perhaps even the safest course.

  But the war would not wait. In the spring the Allies would most certainly invade France, and then the Reich’s life would be counted out in months. “There’s every chance you might end up settling the fate of Europe for the next thousand years,” Schellenberg had said; and von Niehauser would not do that hiding in a coal cellar. No—if he waited much longer it would matter very little whether the Americans caught him or not.

  . . . . .

  He had called ahead—there was a train leaving Pennsylvania Station for Washington, D.C., at a few minutes after midnight. The destination hardly mattered; all that was important was to get out of Manhattan and somewhere he couldn’t be bottled up quite so completely. He would board at the last possible moment and would buy his ticket from the conductor. People did that all the time.

  There were certain obvious precautions to be taken. On leaving the restaurant he had looked around in the cloakroom for a hat of approximately the right size and walked away with it; running from the apartment, he must have been more shaken than he was aware because there was no other reason why he should have left his own behind. He was a tall man, so it couldn’t be counted on to do much toward hiding his face, but in winter people expected to see a man
wearing a hat.

  Also, he went to a chemist’s—a drugstore, rather—and purchased a bottle of hair dye. If they had his description, as he must assume they did, they would be looking for a man with black hair. After forty minutes in the lavatory of a sleazy hotel room on West Twenty-third Street which he rented for no other purpose, he was able to bring his hair to a reddish blond. He nearly blinded himself trying to do the eyebrows, but the results were passable. In the station he would be sure to walk with his hat off.

  The one point on which he found it difficult to make a decision was luggage. It seemed reasonable that anyone taking a late train to a city over two hundred miles distant would wish to take at least a suitcase, if only to be provided with a clean shirt and a few toilet articles. But a new suitcase might be as conspicuous as none—the police would be looking for something of the kind.

  The problem was solved when he happened to pass a pawn shop. He bought what in England they called a Gladstone, worn threadbare by decades of service. A couple of tablecloths—stained but serviceable, and selling for twenty-five cents apiece—padded it out quite well.

  For the rest, he would simply have to take his chance.

  The next few hours were passed in a kind of frantic aimlessness. Von Niehauser was tortured by the unfocused suspicion of every hunted man, the feeling that every eye was upon him, that everyone he passed on the sidewalks or stood beside as he waited for the traffic lights to change must know everything about him, that he had become somehow preternaturally conspicuous. He found himself looking for mirrors and studying himself in shop windows to check the color of his hair; he half expected to see a halo of black coming through every time he took off his hat. The image that stared back at him seemed so strange—could anyone actually look like that?

  He tried to stay off the streets as much as possible—one never knew how large a force this Federal Bureau of Investigation might have at its disposal, or where they might be patrolling—but at the same time he felt the danger of lingering in any one spot too long. He would take a chair in a restaurant, making sure his back was to the door, order a cup of coffee, stay as long as it took to drink half of it, and then leave. Always he kept moving closer and closer to Pennsylvania Station.

  At five minutes to twelve, he crossed Seventh Avenue and started toward the main entrance. He knew it was too soon, that he should have waited another two or three minutes, but somehow it was impossible—he had to begin to make his escape.

  The huge foyer was as large as the central square in von Niehauser’s native village, and walking down the stairway from the street he felt hideously exposed. There must have been three or four hundred people down there, and anyone of them had merely to turn his head—he felt like an actor on a stage. His eyes scanned the crowd, trying to spot the policemen he felt certain would be there.

  No one stepped forward to arrest him as he crossed the floor. Perhaps they hadn’t seen him yet. Perhaps they were only waiting to corner him. At any rate, no one came near him.

  The great board listing arrivals and departures directed him to track five. He bought a newspaper along the way, tucked it under his arm, and set out for his train.

  Even at that time of night, the train was crowded. Almost every seat was taken, and von Niehauser found he had to sit with his bag across his knees because there was no room left in the overhead racks. The man next to him seemed to be asleep, with the side of his head resting against the window.

  The carriage was uncomfortably warm. Below the main foyer had been the waiting areas and the entrances to the tracks, and below them the trains themselves; like Dante’s Inferno, each level, as you descended from one to the next, was progressively hotter. And in the train, with so many people packed so tightly together, it was like the furnace room of a ship; von Niehauser could feel the sweat trickling down his back under the heavy overcoat. It was like the submarine all over again. It was difficult to catch one’s breath.

  And the train hadn’t begun to move. He looked at his watch—it was six minutes after midnight, and the doors were still open. They should have been underway four minutes ago.

  The temperature seemed to rise. There was no sound except the droning of the ceiling fans. Von Niehauser checked the time again—it was ten minutes after twelve. He could feel his heart pounding.

  The man sitting next to him had begun to wake up, gradually pulling himself into an upright position and twitching through the shoulders and arms, as if he were being jolted awake by degrees. Finally he opened his eyes and began looking around with hostile boredom. Von Niehauser took the opportunity to attract his attention.

  “We appear to be delayed,” he said quietly, trying not to seem intrusive. “I wonder if there could be some difficulty.”

  “It’s the war—where’ve you been, buddy?” The man shrugged sleepily. His voice was nothing but a husky murmur, but he seemed to be addressing himself to the coach at large. He might have been summarizing the grievances of the whole of the traveling public. “I don’t know,” he went on. “They schedule trains at these crazy hours, and then you get on board and wait. I think they do it on purpose.”

  He didn’t seem to expect a reply—he looked rather as if he might actually resent one—so von Niehauser remained silent, thinking that probably the fellow was right. After all, it was wartime, even in America, and war was the mother of inefficiency. In Berlin. . .

  But there was that something else which wouldn’t allow him to relax. In Russia, during the successive withdrawals that had constituted the whole recent history of German arms, he had learned to trust his instincts. It was the logic of defeat that you should have been killed a dozen times over, and if you lived it was because you could separate out from the fear that never left you that inner voice that whispered that somewhere, somehow, you had been given a warning. Von Niehauser was hearing that voice now, just loud enough to keep him prickly with apprehension.

  The other passengers were becoming restless. You could see it in the faces of women as they held their sleeping children and stared out the windows at nothing. For all that the ceiling fans could do, the air was growing grayish blue with cigarette smoke.

  It was twenty minutes past the hour. Von Niehauser hadn’t seen a conductor since he had come on board.

  Presently the door that led to the car in front slid open, and a young man in a hat and an open tan topcoat came in. He wasn’t in a hurry; he glanced around for a moment and then began making his way toward the rear of the coach. He kept his hands in his coat pockets. His face was set, as if the muscles had hardened with disuse. Only his eyes were alive.

  They always gave themselves away, von Niehauser thought to himself, suddenly quite calm. In that there seemed to be no difference between this Federal Bureau and the Gestapo—even when they were trying to disguise themselves they always carried with them the same arrogance, as if they had been set apart from the rest of the breed. And perhaps they had.

  It was the hands that betrayed this one. Anyone else walking through a train, even while it rested in the station, would have guided himself down the aisle by holding on to the outside corners of the seats; it would have been a reflex, something done without thinking. But this one never took his hands out of his pockets. Why did police everywhere have this obsession about their hands, as if to show them openly might be a damaging admission of their all too common humanity? Perhaps they wanted to be like primitive idols, simply an outline.

  They were searching the train.

  8

  It was all over in a moment. The policeman—and there could be no question of his being anything else—passed down the aisle and into the next coach. Von Niehauser heard him closing the door behind himself.

  There had been no arrest, of course, nor even the hint of recognition. But that, of course, meant nothing. He would have to posit that von Niehauser was armed—he would be mistaken, but he would have to be a fool to suppose anything else—and he would hardly care to risk armed resistance aboard a crowded passenger
train. He would want reinforcements.

  The alternatives, therefore, were perfectly straightforward. There was no point in running because if he were observed he would never make it out of the station. So it came down to this: he could simply wait where he was and hope that he had gone undetected, or he could assume the worst and attempt to deal with this one man before he had a chance to call in any others. Either way, the risks were appalling.

  The gentleman next to him had apparently gone back to sleep, so von Niehauser rose quietly, leaving his bag and his newspaper on the seat behind him. After the fashion of travelers, everyone else was either too tired or too excited or too preoccupied with their own problems and discomforts to notice his departure. After all, he would be right back; hadn’t he left his things?

  The policeman was still in the next car behind. Von Niehauser could see him through the open door as he walked past.

  It was odd how one never seemed to think of them as ever having had a youth. In one’s imagination the law was always middle aged, heavy and humorless. But this specimen couldn’t have been more than twenty, for all that he had already mastered the policeman’s masklike blankness. His hat was pushed back on his curly, light brown hair, and there was still a childlike agility in his movements.

  And it seemed that he had yet completely to comprehend the craft of his profession.

  Because why, after all, would anyone walk through a train that still hadn’t left its station? The side doors to all the coaches had been left open, and the platform outside was wider and far less cluttered—anyone going from one coach to the next, even to the one immediately behind, would step out onto the platform. No one would walk through except if he wished the opportunity to study each face at his absolute leisure. In short, no one but a policeman.