Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  So all von Niehauser had to do was to wait until the girl at the circulation desk was called away for a moment, reach over the counter, and take a couple of the cards. They were in plain view—why should anyone wish to steal them?

  All of this had been done the day before his escape from Manhattan, so presumably Lautner would be ready for him by the time he reached Santa Fe, New Mexico. It would be a strange corner of the earth for two alumni of the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute to hold a reunion in the middle of a world war. Von Niehauser had to admit that until that moment in the Fifth Avenue Library he had never heard of Santa Fe, New Mexico. He couldn’t imagine what it would be like. It seemed to be located in the middle of a vast desert, but all he had to guide him were the carefully edited newsreels of the war in Libya he had seen between a couple of mindless comedies during a slack few weeks in Russia. It had been a propaganda blunder to show them, even to that audience of hardened professional soldiers; everyone had been consumed with envy at the marvelous time Rommel and his men seemed to be having out there in the sunshine and the hot sand.

  Would Santa Fe be like that, or would it be winter there too? Von Niehauser looked out through the window of the dining car as his train pulled away from the suburbs of Chicago, where the ground was blinding white with snow. God, how Russia had taught him to hate and fear snow.

  He had hated Chicago too. Even in America the war was having some slight impact on freedom of movement—there was a two-day wait for the next train to Santa Fe, and he had had to bribe the ticket seller to get on that. The delay wasn’t completely unwelcome, however. It would hurt nothing if he spent a few days making absolutely certain that he really had gotten away from the trap set for him in New York, that his movements were of interest to no one. So he checked into the Palmer House, which had the largest advertisement in the telephone directory, and tried—tried—going out for a walk.

  Perhaps the blood had thinned since Briansk. Perhaps the wounding had taken more out of him than he had realized. In any case, the cold wind of that Chicago street was almost more than he could bear. It made him ache, particularly through his rib cage and left arm, where the tiny slivers of Russian shrapnel he still carried felt like razor blades—he had the impression they were twisting frantically, to cut their way in deeper to the warm core of his body. It made him feel positively ill, and he had pushed his way through the revolving door of a department store and stood leaning against the wall for several seconds until he was sure the sensation had passed off. He was surprised to discover, when he brought his hand up to his forehead, that he was sweating heavily.

  So Chicago had been the confines of the Palmer House, where he spent the greater part of one afternoon in his bathroom, dying his hair back to black. His experiment in disguise had not been a great success; it hadn’t kept the policeman in New York from recognizing him, and the color looked so artificial that he felt ridiculously conspicuous. For the rest, he would sit in the lobby and read newspapers. If he felt like eating outside the hotel, he would make a hurried visit across the avenue, down which the wind poured like ice water through a sluice. He had always heard Chicago described as a large city, but how could people live in such a place?

  And on the third morning he had arrived at the train station with his ticket carefully folded away inside his wallet. He was so glad to be on his travels again that he would happily have journeyed the whole distance to Santa Fe, via Kansas City, Topeka, Hutchinson, La Junta, Trinidad and, finally, Lamy—they were only names on a schedule—in a day coach, sleeping in his seat. He would have done it sitting on mail sacks if that had been necessary, but he found himself the beneficiary of that chaos engendered by war. Trains were few and irregular, but there was nothing to be had on that particular one except Pullman berths. He would have a whole compartment, to be shared with only one other traveler. In such times it was so luxurious as to be almost embarrassing.

  There was already a suitcase in the narrow little closet next to the bathroom; it was very old, and kept closed with two leather straps, but the owner was nowhere in evidence. Von Niehauser slipped his own bag under the seat and went to look for something to eat. He was cold and hungry and hadn’t slept at all well the night before. He would meet the companion of his journey soon enough—introductions could wait.

  As he sat over his scrambled eggs and toast—who but the Americans had eggs anymore?—he wondered if Lautner would know him, or if both of them had been so changed out of all recognition by nearly five years of war that they would meet as total strangers.

  Of course, Lautner had spent his five years in this land of milk and honey, where the trains still had dining cars with white tablecloths, so probably he was just the same. Von Niehauser had never liked Lautner.

  “You mistrust him because he is a guttersnipe from Hamburg, Joachim,” Professor Schleiermacher had said, smiling behind his rimless glasses, his hands thrust down into the pockets of his threadbare sweater as he sat in his study. There was a cup of tea on the desk in front of him, but it was coated with dust and as cold as tap water; he had forgotten about it hours ago. “Erich suffers from the disability of not being a Prussian aristocrat. Is it any wonder you suspect the quality of his intelligence?”

  “I wasn’t aware that his intelligence was at issue.”

  “Well. . .” The Professor had shrugged, as if the distinction was not important enough to bother drawing, and finally one small, chubby hand came up and smoothed back the few strands of gray hair that still grew across the top of his skull. “Then let us say the perfect disinterestedness of his motives. His father sells cans of paint over a wooden counter, and the son is ambitious for academic distinction and the upper middle class security of a university career. He cannot affect your detachment.”

  That had been in February of 1936, when Schleiermacher’s Austrian citizenship still protected him from the consequences of having had a Jewish mother, when it was still possible to believe that the Nazi regime was something that would disappear as suddenly as it had come.

  In the strictest confidence, von Niehauser’s father had informed him of the Führer’s plan to occupy the Rhineland, expressing his own belief that it would lead to disaster.

  “The French will resist,” he had said, standing uncomfortably in the exact center of his son’s apartment sitting room. He kept glancing down at the Persian carpet, as if afraid that the pattern might come off on his uniform. “Why shouldn’t they? Our Army is no match for theirs. It will be a rout, a humiliation.”

  “Good. Then perhaps the General Staff will come to their senses and remove the lunatic.”

  The baron had looked grave, almost disapproving. He was perhaps not accustomed to hearing the head of state spoken of in such terms.

  “Yes, perhaps you are right.”

  But, of course, he had not been right. Hitler would simply take a little longer to achieve the final ruin of Germany.

  And Schleiermacher had not been right either. No one could have been more astonished than he when, two years later, after the Anschluss, he lost his professorship and, finally, when the months after Kristallnacht brought his danger home to him, he found himself packing his suitcases for the journey into exile. For the learned scientist and Nobel laureate, politics had always been as unreal as witchcraft.

  “I have been offered a post at Princeton University, in America,” he announced, slouched over a wooden crate full of books—von Niehauser had come over to help him prepare for the loading van.

  “You will like it there. Einstein is there—it should be like old times for you.”

  Schleiermacher had smiled wanly, as if at a rather tasteless joke.

  “It will never be like old times.”

  And then, in the kitchen, over a couple of glasses of cognac—the last in the bottle—the surprise.

  “They tell me I am invited to bring a research staff, that everyone will be offered ‘assistant professorships’—isn’t the American terminology interesting? Erich Lautner has already agreed. I
don’t suppose I could tempt you as well, Joachim? Theoretical science is not going to fare very well under this regime.”

  “Lautner?” Von Niehauser set his glass down on the rough wooden table that the Professor had once told him had been the first purchase he and Frau Schleiermacher had made after their marriage—the liebe Gattin had been dead since 1925. “I should hardly have thought that Lautner. . .”

  “Would have a political conscience? You always underestimated him, you know.”

  “Perhaps.” The sun was setting, and it cast a patch of pinkish light on the kitchen’s back wall. Von Niehauser watched it for a long moment, wondering why he felt as if he were about to commit a breach of decency. “But we cannot all leave. You have no choice, and Lautner has nothing to lose, but some of us have nothing else we can do. I am a Prussian Junker, Herr Professor—my responsibility is here.”

  “I understand. I knew you wouldn’t be able to come.”

  And he had understood. “I shouldn’t like to think that the Nazis are being left quite at liberty,” he had said, smiling and shaking von Niehauser’s hand as he boarded the train for Denmark. To stay had not meant to side with the barbarians.

  And there had been a steady stream of correspondence, almost up to the moment when the Polish crisis had forced the young Privatdozent to revert to type and put on the uniform of an Army officer. After September, 1939, von Niehauser no longer had a regular mailing address, and master and student lost track of each other. Perhaps it was just as well.

  But, in any case, Schleiermacher had been wrong about Erich Lautner too.

  Von Niehauser had read the transcripts in Berlin. Heydrich, who seemed not to have been a fool, had recorded all of his conversations with Lautner on wire. There couldn’t be any doubt about it; the Herr Professor Doktor’s loyal pupil, who had so willingly followed him to the wilderness of Princeton, New Jersey, had all the time been a creature of the SS. “The Party will see to your career when you come back,” Heydrich had said. Two such perfectly unscrupulous villains; they must have understood each other to a nicety.

  . . . . .

  The dining car was oppressively hot. Von Niehauser found it impossible to eat anything and pushed his plate away from him. “Was everything all right, sir?” the waiter asked, his black face puckered with concern as he cleared the table. His voice was deep and rich and touchingly human. Von Niehauser almost started, the man had been so silent. He managed to smile.

  “Everything was fine. It seems I’ve lost my appetite.”

  “You might be coming down with something—it’s the flu season, you know, sir. You want me to bring you some aspirin?”

  The door to his compartment was slightly ajar when he returned, and he could see a pair of long thin legs in khaki trousers stretched from the wider of the two seats to almost the precise center of the floor. It gave von Niehauser a decided thrill of anxiety to realize that his traveling companion was apparently a British Army major.

  For an instant, he thought he might be walking into a trap—the British were the enemy too, after all—but then he saw that the man was asleep, his shoulder jammed into the corner of the seat and his head resting peacefully against the wall. His hands were folded in his lap.

  Well, the Army had to travel like everyone else, and not even the British were so relaxed that they took naps while waiting to arrest people. Von Niehauser found his seat, allowing the air trapped in his lungs to escape into a faint sigh. This one was no immediate danger.

  He was career officer from the look of him. It was the sort of thing you could always detect if you took the trouble. The hair was sandy, with white at the bottoms of the closely shaved sideburns, and the mustache was florid. The complexion was brick red, even to the eyelids—he had that indefinable look of a man who has spent a fair part of his life in a tropical climate. From the condition of the hands, and particularly the fingernails, it was clear that this was not someone born a gentleman.

  Also, he was, from all appearances, about fifty—too old to have been drafted. And even asleep he carried himself with that slight rigidity that becomes second nature to the professional soldier and that civilians, even after years of war, never seem to acquire.

  It was a conclusion in which von Niehauser found a certain degree of comfort. He was a member of the caste himself—at least by birth—and he supposed he understood that species of man as well as any. And the British were, after all, the British.

  In the end, culture was everything. A German officer might have been a formidable adversary; in Germany it was the best minds that went into the Army. But the British were a nation of civilians. Soldiers were, as a whole, distrusted, and the career military—with the possible exception of the Navy; in his years in the country, von Niehauser had met relatively few sailors, so he didn’t feel himself in a position to judge—didn’t attract the best and the brightest.

  This one, snoring slightly through his pursed lips, didn’t look as if he had been the type to take a First at school. So perhaps it would be possible to relax a little. Perhaps they could simply ride along together to Kansas City, or wherever it was that the major was going, and pass the time playing two handed bridge.

  The man’s jacket was hanging up in the narrow little closet next to the lavatory—that much von Niehauser had seen simply upon entering the compartment—and his suitcase was in the rack overhead. An officer carries a pistol when he goes armed, but this one certainly didn’t have one on his person. When the opportunity presented itself, von Niehauser would have to check the luggage and the closet. It was the sort of thing one felt better for knowing.

  The train began going around a wide curve, and apparently that slight shift in the center of balance was enough to jar the major awake because suddenly he jerked into an upright position and opened his eyes. He didn’t seem particularly happy to see von Niehauser, who smiled.

  “Did I wake you?”

  “Damned trains—never could sleep on ’em.” The accent was Edwardian country squire, just a little too thick to be quite real. He scowled, as if the reflection had left a bad taste in his mouth, and then he did what no genuine English gentleman would have done and stretched out his hand across the width of the compartment. After a split second of astonished hesitation, von Niehauser took it.

  “Major Archie Dowland.”

  Major Archie Dowland grinned, revealing a pronounced space between his two front teeth and a good deal of gold bridgework. His palm was hard with calluses, and it seemed that no one had ever taught him that a crushing grip wasn’t always taken as certain evidence of manhood and veracity. Still, von Niehauser wasn’t such a snob that he couldn’t appreciate the obvious friendly intention.

  “Paul Bayle,” he answered, smiling gamely as his arm was jerked up and down like a pump handle, wondering if that particular forged passport—one of four he had been issued in Berlin—happened to be the one he was presently carrying in his wallet.

  Archie turned out to be a pleasant enough sort. They went to the lounge car together, and the waiter, after explaining the eccentricities of the Illinois liquor laws and accepting a two dollar bribe, kept them supplied with Scotches and water, and by the time they made it to the dining car for a late lunch von Niehauser had heard practically the whole story of the major’s life and career. He was unusually confiding for an Englishman: before they were halfway through their meatloaf and mashed potatoes, Archie had retailed the history of his three collapsed marriages, complete with a word for word account of the judge’s summary in the last case, and had described the fiasco that had gotten him shipped off to the States to work in “supply liaison.” Of course, that might only have been the liquor.

  “Stupid business,” he announced thickly, wiping the fringes of his mustache with the side of his index finger. “The bloody Johnnie had no business going over my head like that. Still, could have been worse I suppose—’cept that I can’t see how. Can’t stand the bloody Yanks.”

  Having accepted von Niehauser’s story abou
t being an exiled Dutch journalist, Dowland seemed to feel perfectly at liberty to express his distaste for all things American—the solidarity of Allied Europe was something he seemed willing to take on faith. One had the impression that this was probably someone who really didn’t much like anyone who wasn’t British, middle class, career military, and somewhat less than middling successful. Von Niehauser was careful not to antagonize him.

  “I’m not very fond of them myself,” he said, raising an eyebrow and pantomiming a stealthy look over his shoulder. “But one can’t always choose one’s friends.”

  “I’m surprised you’re not with the Free Dutch, a young man like you.” Dowland’s face was a mask of friendly contempt until von Niehauser laid a hand across his left shoulder and arm.

  “They wouldn’t have me anymore. I was shot up pretty badly when the Germans came, so I was mustered out. Fortunes of war.”

  15

  Von Niehauser wondered if it might possibly rank as one of the central misfortunes of his life that in all likelihood he would never know what Missouri looked like. The winter sky was already as impenetrable as a wall by the time they crossed over the state line from Illinois and, as far as he could make out in the odd moments when some glimmer from an unseen farmhouse thinned the darkness, the horizon was nothing but a flat black line.

  But he was happy enough simply to stare out into the night and feel the train rocking beneath him. Dowland was asleep again, snoring heavily. There was no need to pretend to anyone that he was a Dutch resistance hero, and he could lie quietly on the upper bunk and allow his mind to empty.

  Von Niehauser was not such a fool as to fail to appreciate the advantages of traveling with someone—a man alone somehow seemed to attract more attention—but he found the major tiresome. He was glad the poor clown had drunk so much and was sleeping so soundly; it meant that he would be undisturbed until late in the morning, probably.