Chain Reaction

by Nicholas Guild

  “Buenos dias,” he said as he stood with his back to the car, looking up at Gomá, who was standing on the front porch of the house, holding a small glass in his right hand. “I have come a long way for the purpose of saving your life, Agustin. Don’t you think it would be polite to ask me inside?”

  He smiled, but the upper half of Gomá’s body was covered in shadow—it was really impossible to see anything clearly except a pair of dark trouser legs. Finally Gomá moved back perhaps half a step.

  “Come in, if that is what you wish.”

  A servant, dressed entirely in white, opened the door, and a bar of yellow light fell across the porch, revealing the unpleasant, wary scowl that covered Gomá’s face.

  “You are too kind.”

  The interior of the house was whitewashed and spartan. There were a few plain wooden chairs, a long sofa that looked as if it had seen much service, and a table covered with magazines, about half of them in English—Suñer noticed that several were three and four years old.

  But what he noticed first were the men.

  There were three of them, big men in heavy sheepskin coats and thick boots, men with the look of having lived most of their lives out of doors. But they were no farmers—they all carried pistols, and one of them had a bandolier draped across his shoulder. He recognized the type. They were mercenaries, ex-soldiers probably, who found work as bodyguards and private thugs and who turned to banditry when times were hard. Clearly, Gomá had not come to this godforsaken place on any vacation.

  “Perhaps you would like to send them outside for a breath of air?” Suñer asked, pointing to the one with the bandolier. “They can wait on the porch if that would make you feel safer.”

  Gomá nodded and, without being told, the three men filed out through the door, filling the space behind them with the sound of their boot heels. The room seemed to expand as they left. Without waiting to be asked, Suñer sat down at the end of the sofa nearest the fireplace.

  “What is it that you want, Ernesto? I assume it must have been something truly important to drag you so far away from your comforts.”

  “Yes, it is.”

  The second secretary watched the leather merchant with a certain carefully contained apprehension. Gomá had still not removed the heavy black overcoat that would have been more appropriate to the sidewalks of Mexico City’s financial district than to these windswept, rock strewn, pitilessly empty stretches of desert. His wide peasant’s face was heavy with weariness, making his eyes little more than slits. He hadn’t shaved that morning and his jaw line was shiny. It was obvious that for the past few days he had been under enormous strain.

  “I know about this fellow von Niehauser,” Suñer went on, his voice a marvel of serenity. “Or perhaps you didn’t know that that was his name—at any rate, I know that you have been contacted to see to his escape over the border into this country. It will not do, Agustin. You are going to have to turn the matter over to me so that I can allow the norteamericano police to catch him.”

  For several seconds, Gomá seemed unable to move. He simply continued where he was, standing in the exact center of the room, his feet wide apart, as if he had decided to become a permanent fixture. Nothing registered in his expression, not even surprise. It was as if he hadn’t heard.

  And then, finally, he blinked. It was at least a sign of life. And then he looked down at the floor and frowned—you could have thought that his most cherished illusions had just been swept away for good and all.

  “Do you aristocrats believe in nothing?” he asked finally, in little more than a whisper. “I had thought, Ernesto, that you, at least, would have been with us.”

  “In spirit, yes. But—you must understand, Agustin—I am loyal to nothing more than to my own life. And that is what is at stake here. Not only my life but yours as well.”

  Suñer did his best to smile, but the effort was simply beyond him. What his face must have looked like, he couldn’t have imagined.

  “You see, my friend, they have me. The night before last I received a visit in New York from an Inspector Havens of the FBI, and they have very complete information about my involvement in the Tocula insurrection. They want von Niehauser, and if they don’t get him they will turn that information over to el Presidente and I will be shot.”

  “I fail to grasp what that has to do with me.” Gomá was still staring at the floor, but it was possible to tell from the tone of his voice that he was frightened, that he grasped perfectly well what it had to do with him.

  “Oh, my dear Agustin, you are either very brave or sublimely stupid.” The second secretary found himself finally able to relax—for the first time he noticed the heat of the fire on his face, and it occurred to him that he hadn’t eaten in several hours. It was like suddenly discovering that you were alive. “You know me,” he went on, at last able to manage a convincing smile. “Do you actually imagine that I would go quietly to my death, knowing that you and you alone had it in your power to save me, and that you did not? You had your hand in that sorry business, and I plan to spend my last hours writing out a very complete confession.”

  And there it was. How many times in a man’s life was he presented with a choice of such pristine clarity? It was a moment which, had Agustin been of a more self-conscious disposition, he should have relished.

  But Agustin Gomá, it seemed obvious, did not relish this clear choice. Perhaps—and who could blame him?—his experience of them had been rather too limited for him to have developed into a connoisseur. Or perhaps, as Suñer, to his marked discomfort, was coming more and more to suspect, perhaps the two men did not understand the situation in quite identical terms.

  “And what would happen if I simply gave orders to have you killed, here and now?” Gomá asked suddenly, his face slowly lighting up with an expression of malignant triumph.

  Suñer was disappointed. The man was trying to wriggle out—the esthetic of the thing was ruined. He sighed, and then looked up at the vulgar little leather merchant with as blank an expression as he could manage, bored in advance by the hours of argument and pointless bargaining that must inevitably follow.

  “Agustin, my friend, has it not occurred to you that I would not have come here without taking precautions against precisely that contingency? I have left a letter, to be delivered to the minister of police if I do not return to the capital by Monday, and I have already notified the unpleasant Inspector Havens as to where I am, what I am doing here, and with whom. Believe me, if our own government doesn’t kill you, Havens will. He is a very uncompromising sort of man. You will not like him. Alas, as you see, there is no third choice.”

  “Alas, but there is.”

  There was a silence, during which Gomá appeared to be enjoying himself immensely. And then, all at once, he stamped his foot against the bare wooden floor, and the door opened and the man with the bandolier appeared, holding his sombrero in both hands.

  “Si, patron?” he asked, although it didn’t quite have the inflection of a question. Gomá did not even take the trouble to look at him.

  “You have not, I think, considered the possibilities with quite the care you imagine,” he went on, precisely as if he and Suñer were still alone in the room. “Because, you see, your letter to the minister of police will be too late. Because, you see, when the German gentleman boards the ship that will take him to Lisbon, he will have a companion.”

  Suñer opened his mouth, as if to say something, but then merely closed it again. There seemed to be some object in his throat; he tried swallowing, twice, and with increasing difficulty, but it was to no avail.

  “I have no inclination to stay in my homeland—my wife and children are protected, and the government can do as it wishes toward the confiscation of my property. It will be returned to me when Hitler has won the war and I come back in triumph. I will be a great man then, Ernesto, greater than anything you could possibly imagine. And I have not forgotten your condescension toward me at our last meeting, on the occasi
on of my daughter’s wedding.”

  His eyes seemed to sparkle, and he stood there, staring at some point beyond Suñer’s head, like a man entranced. Then he turned to the armed man at the door.

  “You will take the Señor out to the barn. You will see to it that the manner of his death is not a pleasant one.”

  The man with the bandolier nodded, still holding his sombrero and grinning.

  “Si, Patron.”

  21

  Normally the drive from Los Alamos into Santa Fe took better than an hour and a half. The worst part was the road down from the mesa, which was a hair raising ordeal of switchbacks and blind corners, and always with a sheer drop of several hundred yards not more than six or seven feet from your outside wheel. In some respects it was worse since the Army had brought in their heavy construction crews and paved it over; the slightest whisper of snow would immediately melt and refreeze, making the road like a slalom run with traffic in both directions.

  Nevertheless, on that particular Friday morning Erich Lautner clocked himself at fifty-two minutes.

  It had been exhilarating. He had listened to the tires squeal as he went around a curve, coasting closer and closer to the edge, not knowing and hardly even caring if another car might be coming right up around into him. He had felt the engine throbbing and fought for control over the vibration that came right up at him through the steering wheel—it had given him an enormous sense of power. When the road flattened out, and there was no longer anything except the long, straight stretch of asphalt into Santa Fe, he had experienced a real twinge of disappointment. It wouldn’t be the same going back uphill and, at any rate, by then the mood would have passed off and he probably wouldn’t have the nerve to risk all that again.

  He would have liked to have had Jenny on the seat beside him. He could almost see the way her face would have looked, white as a sheet of paper. He would have liked to have had someone else be afraid besides just himself.

  He was losing Jenny. Even if he weren’t going away, he would lose her anyway. It seemed that she too didn’t have the nerve for risking it all, all over again; she wanted to go back to her husband and forget about her desperate little flirtation with sin. She had begun to look at him as if he were some sort of dangerous criminal.

  So it turned out that Jenny was just another conventional little hausfrau who didn’t care for her husband but hadn’t the stomach for the obvious consequences—another Emma Bovary, but without the daring to sustain even that. And it was a great shame because she was a pretty woman.

  That was the way he tried to frame it for himself on the drive into Santa Fe, as merely another one of life’s unavoidable disappointments, something to be shrugged off and dismissed from one’s mind. He tried not to associate it with the temptation toward panic that had been growing in him ever since he had received his summons from the Sicherheitsdienst. He wanted to keep the two intellectually separate, to avoid, if he could, the perfectly ridiculous suspicion that Jenny’s defection had resulted from her having somehow sensed the truth about him, but it was difficult. It was difficult to be philosophical when so much of one’s comfortable world had been torn away so quickly. It was difficult not to imagine that he who had betrayed no one had now been betrayed.

  It had been easier when he was coming down from the mesa, when excitement and sheer physical fear had been able to blot out this growing, unfocused apprehension. It had been easier when his heart had been pounding in his throat, when there had been no necessity for being philosophical.

  Lautner switched on the car radio and listened first to the weather report—they were predicting a storm, possibly even as early as tomorrow afternoon—and then to some music. They were playing Artie Shaw; Lautner liked Artie Shaw. He liked American music generally; like everything else in this country, it was remarkably comfortable. He wondered what they were playing over the radio in Berlin these days. It didn’t seem very likely that it would be Artie Shaw.

  He could see Santa Fe up ahead—he had been able to for a couple of miles already; there was little enough out there on the desert to obstruct the view. He would go have lunch as soon as he got into town, one of those huge bland American meals that somehow had the power to dull the senses like an injection of morphine. And then he would go see this messenger from Heydrich—except, of course, that Heydrich was dead—and find out what after all these years the Sicherheitsdienst could want of him, damn their eyes.

  Would they really want him to come home? There were bombing raids over most of the big German cities these days. You saw them in the newsreels, white puffs of explosions, like smoke rings from a cigarette, over a flat grid of buildings and streets; Lautner found himself trying to recognize places from the aerial photographs—and probably everything was drying up: ammunition, food, pleasure, hope of victory, cigarettes.

  “As a protege of the SS, you will lead a very comfortable life,” Heydrich had told him. He supposed he was entitled to wonder just how willing—or, indeed, able—the Obergruppenführer’s successors would be to fulfill his promises.

  Of course, if he brought them the bomb. . .

  From force of habit, he parked his car about half a block from the back of the La Ventana Hotel; it wasn’t something he was even aware he had done until he turned a corner and saw the pale neon sign over the front entrance. Of course, Jenny hadn’t been the first woman he had taken there, but realizing how automatically he had found his way almost to the threshold was an ugly sensation, like finding himself somehow divided in half, as if he were one self spying on the private life of the other. He had thought he had put all that out of his mind—it was stupid, really—but it would seem not. The little bitch.

  The restaurant was one of those small but important discoveries that a man makes if he keeps his eyes open. A tiny place, not more than eight or ten tables, but clean and inexpensive, and the owner had friends in the cattle business and seemed never to have heard of meat rationing. Lautner ate there as often as he could, sometimes after Jenny had gone back up to the mesa with her girlfriends: it would have been instructive to know how many of them were meeting men in out of the way hotel rooms.

  On the whole, he preferred to eat alone; he found women under such circumstances an unpleasant distraction, without an idea in their heads that didn’t relate back to themselves and their own really rather limited charms. If he wanted to talk he preferred to talk to a man and a scientist, and for the rest he liked to keep to himself.

  But the food really was very good. The only disagreeable thing was that they didn’t serve wine. He would have liked a bottle of good, heavy-scented red wine. He would have liked leaving for his appointment just pleasantly fuzzy. But it wasn’t to be.

  When he was finished, he paid and left. As he passed by the window he could see the waiter clearing away his dishes.

  The contact codes had been worked out and explained to him almost immediately after he had agreed to defect to the West with Professor Schleiermacher. It wasn’t a very complicated business—a bit excessively ingenious, but that was to be expected from the SS. Actually, all Lautner had to do was to appear at a certain place at a certain time, and hope that the plan had not been compromised to the American authorities.

  The Santa Fe Public Library was a strange mixture of architectural styles: a cocoa-colored little box with a low, flat roof and brick trim, but with a white, faintly Georgian portico, and a series of balconied windows no more than five feet from the ground and painted turquoise. There was also a bay window and it was painted turquoise as well. All in all, it made a very curious impression. Lautner, whose literary tastes ran mainly to detective stories, had never been inside before, but he discovered he rather liked the place. It was less intimidating than the vast pseudo­Grecian horrors of gray stone to which he was accustomed. One might almost have expected to find a little garden in the back, with a tiny fountain tinkling noisily, except, of course, that gardens weren’t usual in New Mexico.

  The hallways were of tile and made hi
s footsteps sound extraordinarily loud, which, of course, might only have been the work of his imagination. He was thirsty and his hands were sweating; he felt as if he might be coming down with something. He wondered about the man he was supposedly going to meet, whether it could be anyone he knew. But, of course, who would he have known in the SS? It would probably be some thug with a broken nose, the sort who would naturally look with contempt at anyone who was not some version of himself. The whole business was too colossally absurd; they would probably both end up getting killed.

  The history section was relatively small, only part of a single room. The books were grouped by country and period. After a little hunting, Lautner found the Italian Renaissance, but he almost turned and fled when he rounded a corner between two rows of shelves and discovered himself staring at the back of a military uniform. The man was leaning against the wall with his shoulder. He seemed to be reading—or perhaps simply waiting. For a second or two Lautner couldn’t be sure he hadn’t shouted with frightened surprise.

  And then the man turned around and smiled at him. The first thing Lautner noticed was that the uniform was British—at least he wasn’t about to be arrested. And then his eyes came to rest on the face, and the brief flood of relief seemed to freeze up inside him.

  “Hello, Erich,” the man said in English, the smile still on his lips. It was odd, but Lautner was sure that this was not someone who had ever called him by his first name before.

  Because, of course, he didn’t recognize him all at once. This was someone he had known, but not in England, and certainly not in the United States. He searched his memory, and then he realized that it was the uniform itself that had confused him. Yes—he knew him now. Dear God!