Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  “‘Innuendo’? Is that what you call it?” Havens allowed himself a short, ugly laugh. “I’ll tell you what, pal. Unless I get what I came for, all that ‘innuendo’ will end up on el Presidente’s desk and you’ll find yourself on a plane to Mexico City—I’m sure there won’t be any trouble about having you deported. I’ll leave it to your imagination what’s likely to happen when you arrive.”

  There was one of those unpleasant silences that could go either way. You never really knew how a particular man responded to that kind of a threat until you tried it out on him. Suñer seemed to be considering whether it might still be possible to bluster it out; he was sitting very quietly, and his cheeks puffed out slightly as he breathed through his mouth.

  “And what was it that you came for?” he asked finally, his voice hardly more than a murmur—he was even smiling.

  No, this was not someone interested in the martyr’s crown.

  “There’s a German agent running around loose in this country.” Havens shifted uncomfortably in his chair, wondering why he felt so disappointed. “He’s here to gather intelligence on certain classified government projects and then, presumably, to return to the Fatherland. The most reasonable conjecture is that he’ll attempt to make his escape through Mexico, and for that he’ll need help. You’re going to find out where and when he plans to cross the border, and then you’re going to sell him out to us.”

  The smile on the second secretary’s face was beginning to look as if it were being held in place with surgical wire.

  “What makes you think I would be able to come by that sort of information, Mr.—?” A pink tongue felt along the edge of Suñer’s lower lip—it was the sort of nervous gesture that spoke volumes. Havens decided to wait on the formal introductions.

  “Come on. Spare me the coy demurs. We have it that you’re very thick with the Fascist sympathizers, that they have you marked down for great things in the New Order—you shouldn’t have any trouble.”

  It was odd, but Suñer seemed flattered. It seemed to make him feel better, as if Havens had come to him for a favor. He could resume thinking of himself as a big wheel.

  “I might perhaps be able to do something,” he said, his face growing serious as he reached up to smooth down his tie—the man’s self-conceit was almost awe inspiring. “Of course, you understand that I can offer no guarantees, but it should be easy enough to make a few inquiries.”

  Havens laughed all over again, more out of discomfort than anything else.

  “Well, it’s a good thing then that I’m not asking for any guarantees,” he said, putting the revolver back into the waistband of his trousers. He really didn’t like Suñer at all. “I don’t think we need any guarantees, because if we don’t bag this guy—if you fuck up, or get any surges of loyalty to the Cause, and he makes it out of the country alive—we’re not going to be interested in any guarantees. If you deliver, then that’s fine; we’ll be very grateful. If you don’t, I think you can more or less count on being stood up against a wall.”

  It was a few minutes after one in the morning by the time Suñer was fully briefed. By then he knew almost as much about Joachim von Niehauser as Havens did himself—he even had copies of the one photograph of von Niehauser known to exist. Suñer promised he would have at least some preliminary information within twenty-four hours.

  “Well, don’t take any siestas between now and then—time is on his side, not ours.”

  By a quarter after one, when Havens closed the rear door of the apartment building behind himself, he was almost grateful for the cold, clear winter air. As he walked along the side street up to where he expected to find Stevenson’s car parked, he felt more tired than he ever had before in his life.

  “I called that number you gave me for your exchange,” Stevenson said as he turned the ignition key. The engine coughed into life, and the headlamps, focused on a narrow patch of roadway and sidewalk, seemed to shut out the rest of the world. “They said you should call someone named Pearson—they made it sound pretty urgent. Who’s Pearson?”

  “A kid I’ve borrowed from the Bureau to read police reports for me. It can wait until I get back to the hotel.”

  Havens slouched down in his seat, allowing his hat to cover his eyes.

  After Stevenson had dropped him off, and he had climbed the three flights of stairs to his front door, he seriously considered just leaving Pearson until the morning—hell, that wasn’t more than four or five hours away in any case—but then he thought better of it and picked up the phone.

  “The New Mexico Highway Patrol found a stiff about fifteen feet from the railway tracks just outside of a place called Clayton—that’s about eight miles from the Oklahoma border. The guy was in his underwear, and we haven’t got a fingerprint make on him yet, but his larynx had been crushed.”

  Havens put down the telephone as gently as if it had been a Dresden teacup. All ideas of sleep had vanished from his mind—he had forgotten all about being tired.

  Von Niehauser was on his way to Los Alamos.

  17

  Santa Fe turned out to be nothing like El Alamein.

  For one thing, it was cold. There were flakes of snow drifting through the air as von Niehauser got off the train, and there were bright little halos around the street lights. The air hurt the inside of his throat. He buttoned up the collar of his khaki overcoat and tried to keep within the shelter of the buildings—there was an irregular but persistent wind that cut like broken glass.

  The stationmaster had directed him toward the center of town, indicating that he would find plenty of hotels but that, “none of ’em ain’t exactly the Ritz.” The stationmaster, a heavyish, dissatisfied looking man in his late fifties, apparently didn’t think very much of Santa Fe. Von Niehauser followed the direction he had indicated with a peremptory stab of his finger. He shifted the suitcase over to his right hand, putting his left deep into the overcoat pocket in an effort to keep it warm. His arm and shoulder were bothering him again.

  “After the war you can have the rest of the shrapnel dug out,” the surgeon at Wittenburg had said. “For the time being you’ll find that it’s only an inconvenience, and right now we have our hands full with the critical cases.” Von Niehauser hadn’t objected—after all, anyone who had been to the front lines could see the logic of it—but he had been offended by the man’s tone, as if he had wished to make him ashamed.

  But, after all, he wasn’t dead, and New Mexico wasn’t the Russian steppes. At that precise moment the men he had left behind there were doubtlessly suffering far more than he, and that did make him feel ashamed.

  Here and there were visible the flickerings of neon signs, and once in a while a door would open to cast a distorted rectangle of white light across the sidewalk—the light from the overhead lamps hardly seemed to make it so far down as that. There were a few cars whizzing by on the streets, and for some reason they all seemed to make the same odd insectlike sound as they passed, as if it had something to do with the quality of the roadway. No one else was out of doors, however; at such an hour, and in such cold, that was hardly remarkable.

  Finally he came to a place called the La Ventana Hotel. The paint on the outside was peeling, but a British major on furlough wouldn’t have a fortune to spend on accommodations.

  The man behind the desk was a small, square Mediterranean type with the thinnest tracing of a mustache. He might have been powerfully built once, but now his skin merely looked two or three sizes too large for him. He pushed the registration book at von Niehauser, not even interested enough to glance up.

  “I’ll be staying for about a week,” von Niehauser said gently—for some reason the man gave the impression of laboring under some terrible sadness. “Shall I pay in advance?”

  “Fine—suit yourself.”

  Von Niehauser signed the book as “Major Archibald Dowland” and laid a twenty-dollar bill down over the signature. The clerk whisked it into a drawer with a single deft motion.

  �
�That’ll last you through Tuesday,” he said, looking with watery brown eyes at a spot just above von Niehauser’s right shoulder. He slid the key across the desk. “Two-thirteen. Just take the stairs.”

  It was a dingy little room, but von Niehauser found it strangely comforting. In the context of present history, elegant luxury would have amounted almost to a reproach. He took off his shoes and lowered himself heavily onto the bed, which creaked like a nail being pulled out of a board.

  Certainly the federal police would be looking for him, and it was possible that Dowland’s body had already been discovered. It would take them a few days before they would be able to identify it—he wondered, in an abstract way, if he shouldn’t have taken the opportunity to cut off Dowland’s hands; certainly that would have slowed matters for them. One cannot count on one’s enemies being fools. He had four or perhaps five days before they tracked him down and arrested him. His disguise might hold that long.

  So. By, say, Saturday afternoon he had to have his business finished and be on his way out of the country. After that, he would in all probability be either dead or in prison, and in either case of no further use to the German war effort.

  There was a large light brown patch on the ceiling, probably caused at some time in the past by a leaky pipe. It was the approximate shape of the continent of Australia. Germany was at war with Australia too. Germany seemed to be at war with everybody. Von Niehauser closed his eyes and tried not to think about it.

  . . . . .

  “We got elk, we got bighorns, we even got grizzlies, if you like that sort o’ stuff. You name it.”

  The hardware store, which doubled as a sporting goods store, was run by a pink, well scrubbed gentleman with thinning brown hair and rimless glasses. High up on the wall behind his counter was a collection of stuffed hunting trophies which suggested that perhaps he wasn’t quite as domesticated as he seemed.

  “I’ll follow your advice,” von Niehauser said, smiling as he set his hat down gently on top of the glass case filled with evil looking knives with wrapped leather handles. “I’ve never been out in this part of the world before. We used to have elk in Scotland, but I’ve. . . What is a ‘grizzly’?”

  The storekeeper laughed shortly, as if he were being questioned by a child. “Well, that’s a kind of bear,” he answered. “Mean as cobs—tear you to pieces soon as look at you. Better stick to elk.”

  “I’ve hunted bear. In Denmark once, before the war. Let’s not rule anything out.”

  It seemed to work. The storekeeper stopped grinning and stepped back to a rack of impressive looking rifles, gleaming with gun oil and polished wooden stocks. Several of them were mounted with telescopic sights.

  “What ’r you used to?” he asked, putting his hand over the butt plate of the lowest rifle. His eyes narrowed a little behind the rimless glasses.

  “A Steyr-Mannlicher 9 millimeter.” Instantly von Niehauser saw that he had made a mistake.

  “That a German make?”

  “Yes.” Von Niehauser smiled again. “A wonderful thing—I bought it in 1931. No longer available, as you can imagine.”

  “Well, we got nothin’ like that. Why don’t you try a Winchester 30.06? You like bolt action or lever?”

  “Bolt action. It’s all I’ve ever used.”

  And he bought a box of ammunition, hunting clothes, long underwear, a pair of gloves, boots, woolen stockings, a compass, and a map. The total bill came to almost seventy-five dollars. The storekeeper had forgotten all about the Steyr-Mannlicher; Major Dowland was a gentleman, a sportsman, and his friend.

  “Is there somewhere I could rent a truck?” von Niehauser asked, proud of himself for not having called it a lorry. He spread out the map on the counter and used his finger to trace a circle around Santa Fe. “I suppose it will have to be somewhere fairly close, on account of gasoline rationing. What would you recommend?”

  The storekeeper seemed to consider the problem for a moment, and then he laid the point of his thumb down on a spot about thirty miles north and west.

  “The Jemez Range is good this time o’ year. I got a cousin can swing a truck for you—and all the gas you need at the right price. ‘Course, you’ll have to stay away from the mesa. Used to be good up in those parts, but the Army’s got a base there now and it’s all restricted.”

  . . . . .

  It was a hard scramble for a man who had spent most of the last six months inside either a submarine or a military convalescent hospital. The ground was covered with loose rock, and you could never be perfectly sure of your footing. Von Niehauser found he had to rest every sixty or seventy yards—in places he was practically having to climb hand over hand.

  The owner of the hardware store wasn’t the only one who had mentioned the military installation on Los Alamos Mesa; the clerk at the variety store where von Niehauser had inquired about directions and purchased a tube of lip balm thought that was where they were training the troops for the invasion of Japan. Apparently there were a lot of theories.

  But if the Army had a major facility in this godforsaken place, it wasn’t to get ready to fight the Japanese, not if Erich Lautner was here. They had to be building the bomb.

  But that wasn’t the sort of conclusion one could afford to draw on the strength of a surmise, so von Niehauser had set out to see for himself.

  The truck was a dark blue and covered almost to the windows in mud. It and a full tank of gas had cost von Niehauser fifteen dollars, which was little short of robbery.

  “Mind you have it back here at the first sign o’ weather,” the hardware store owner’s cousin had said, squinting into the pale winter sunlight. “We’re supposed t’ have a real good blow comin’ up sometime toward the end o’ the week, an’ you don’t wanta get caught out in that.”

  He put a lean, taloned hand on the fender of the truck, making it fairly obvious what was the real object of his concern. “You got a good three hundred miles in that tank—hell, you could go to Arizona an’ back on less ‘n that.”

  His laughter at his own joke had been a kind of dry cackle, almost as if something had gotten caught in his throat. Von Niehauser hadn’t liked him very much.

  But the desert had been a species of revelation. In fact, you were hardly justified in calling it a desert at all. Here and there, especially as you began to climb into the mountains, you found considerable stands of strangely twisted pine trees, never very large but possessing a certain grotesque grandeur of their own. It was possible to imagine that in the warmer months the ground might yield forth bushes and grass and even perhaps the odd wildflower. It was very far from being a dead place.

  But what was startling were the vistas. Everything was swallowed up in vastness, great empty spaces of stone and sky, blue and purple and gray. Nothing in Europe could prepare a man for this.

  Von Niehauser’s father had been fond of “scenery.” He had not been a man of highly developed esthetic sensibilities—painting, for instance, had always struck him as rather effete—but he liked to take the train down into Swabia for a few weeks every year and he and the baroness would walk along the well worn mountain paths and enjoy the views of little valleys and distant fortresses from the twelfth century. These things had a certain charm for him. God alone knew what he would have made of New Mexico.

  Swabia was merely pretty, the stuff of attractive memories, comfortable, almost domestic. But this land cared for no one. It was inhuman in its loneliness.

  “You have a pronounced streak of the morbid in your character, Joachim,” his father had told him once. “I think it comes from your mother’s side of the family—your grandfather was a great reader of Kleist. It isn’t something I should cultivate if I were you.”

  Perhaps. Nevertheless, von Niehauser found the very austerity of the place deeply appealing. At times, as he had driven over the rutted dirt roads and watched the abrupt changes of landscape, he almost forgot why he had come.

  But never quite. It was never completely possible while
he skirted along the miles and miles of barbed wire fence, hung with signs indicating the terrible revenge the federal government would exact from all trespassers. Finally, when the truck began climbing into the Jemez Mountains and the great desolate flatlands fell away, he was kept occupied with the idea that the Army might have established patrols beyond the perimeters of what seemed to be one of their testing ranges, that as a foreigner he might be subject to interrogation, that it would lead to no end of trouble if he were forced to leave four or five American soldiers dead along the side of a fire road. He kept thinking of time: a few days, that was all he had before the dogs would be barking at his heels. Less time than that if he was unlucky enough to encounter any serious resistance.

  Finally, when the road dwindled down almost to nothing, he drove the truck in behind a mass of scrub pine, took out his rifle, and stuffed the pockets of his jacket with the candy bars he had purchased at a drugstore on the outskirts of Santa Fe. It had occurred to him, almost as an afterthought, that he hadn’t eaten anything since breakfast the day before, not since he had been forced to kill Archie Dowland, and it would hardly do for him to start turning shaky in the middle of the wilderness. He estimated that he had perhaps as much as another two miles to cover.

  Because, of course, it would have been remarkably poor technique to have climbed the rest of the way on the side of the mountain facing Los Alamos. He had driven around behind and would only come straight to the eastern face when he was near the summit; he wanted to be well above the mesa, so he could have as clear a view as possible. Schellenberg might have told him about the inconveniences connected with being a spy, but—no—he had been left to discover all of those for himself.

  Had he really been interested in mountain sheep, he would have found himself presented with several opportunities. He had what appeared to be an excellent rifle, with an eight-power telescopic sight, and several times he caught the poor creatures staring stupidly at him from across a few hundred feet of gorge—the mountain, for some reason, was cut in several places along the sides with huge vertical crevasses. The sheep would watch him for a few minutes, then shake their horns as if to register their incomprehension, and wander away. Perhaps by some instinct they knew that he meant them no harm.