Rip the Angels from Heaven

by David Krugler

  “Right,” I promptly agreed.

  “So this is what we came up with: you’re here to interrogate Doctor Oppenheimer.”

  I stared blankly.

  “You met Doctor Oppenheimer in my office today,” Latham said.

  Oppie, of course—short for Oppenheimer. “How will me claiming to be here to question this Oppenheimer convince Brode he’s not being set up?”

  Foley held up a thick black binder. “Doctor Oppenheimer had some, uh, dubious connections when he was younger. And his wife, Kitty, oh boy, lemme tell—” A glare from Latham cut off that sentence. “Anyway, what you’re gonna do, Voigt, is, you’re gonna memorize everything in this binder—you gotta know more about Oppenheimer than he knows about himself. Because you’re gonna tell Brode you’ve been sent here to reinvestigate Oppenheimer as well as Ackerly, Fuchs—everyone you helped interrogate today, including Brode.”

  “I didn’t question anyone—I was just a silent observer.”

  “That’s actually good—makes you look more authoritative. Like you’re letting the local yokels do their thing before you take charge and do it right. No offense, sir.” Foley smiled weakly at the colonel.

  “None taken. Just part of the cover story, after all.”

  “That’s right,” Foley said. “You’re gonna tell Brode that the brass in Washington think something hinky’s happening down here, that the Reds have penetrated the project.”

  “Which sadly is the truth,” remarked Meacham, who hadn’t said anything yet. We all looked at him. He was middle-aged, his brown hair going gray. Reading glasses perched on the end of his nose, along with his off-white shirt and red striped tie, gave him a teacherly appearance.

  “Let’s stay focused on what Voigt has to do,” Latham said after a moment of uncomfortable silence. Translation: If Voigt succeeds, the Reds get nothing.

  “Anyway, you’ll tell Brode the brass don’t trust us”—Foley circled his finger at himself, the colonel, and Jarowsky—“to question Oppenheimer because we’ve known him too long.”

  “This explains why you just got here and why you’re here tonight at Trinity,” Latham added.

  I nodded. It was a good story, plausible without being complicated, a passable cover. But only if I could learn my lines. I walked over to Foley and took the binder from him.

  “How long do I have?” I asked him.

  “One hour,” Latham answered for him.

  “Jesus, that’s not much time. Sir.”

  “Then you better get started, Lieutenant. The ruse we have for Brode only flies if we bring him here before the arming party heads out.”

  CHAPTER 35

  JAROWSKY TOOK ME TO ONE OF THE PLYWOOD WORKSPACES IN THE living room. A folding table was buried beneath precarious stacks of clipboards, rolled charts, and more black binders. One bump, and the whole mess would plummet to the floor.

  “Don’t touch anything,” Jarowsky joked. He checked his watch. “See you at oh-one-twenty.”

  I sat down in a battered folding metal chair and carefully slid my knees under the table. Fortunately, the previous occupant had managed to squeeze an ashtray onto the table. I lit up, opened the binder, started cramming. Facts like fallen leaves, strewn across a vast lawn, collected pell-mell in the blades of my rushing rake …

  J. Robert Oppenheimer, born April 22, 1904. J for Julius, his father; but he never used that name. Only Robert or Bob. A Dutch scientist nicknamed him Opje, that got Americanized to Oppie. Upper-class German Jewish family, New York, private schools, Harvard. Graduate work overseas in laboratories in Cambridge and Göttingen. At twenty-four, he was already a professor at the University of California at Berkeley and at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, some sort of dual appointment. Brilliant physicist, producing important papers one after another. How quantum mechanics explains molecule movements. The mass limits of certain stars’ neutron cores. All Greek to me, the science; but the bare biographical details weren’t much more useful. Facts you could get from Who’s Who or a puff profile in a magazine. J. Robert Oppenheimer, present; Oppie, absent.

  Rake, rake. Away from the lab and the blackboard, he read French poetry and Dostoevsky. His wealthy father bought him good cars, he drove recklessly, even wrecked a Chrysler racing a train. He socialized with his students, made them omelets in his apartment and treated them to expensive dinners. Money was no worry, his parents supplemented his salary. Adjectives and impressions from field interviews with friends, colleagues, neighbors, and landlords offered glimpses into his personality. Charming. Intense. A true Renaissance man, quoting poetry in one breath, doing mathematics in the next. And this: He’s popular and well liked, but even at a crowded party he seems like the loneliest man there. That comment stuck as I read about an incident from his time at the Cambridge laboratory, where he left an adulterated apple on his tutor’s desk. The man wasn’t poisoned, but Oppenheimer, just twenty-one, was almost expelled. Was it homesickness? Depression, mental instability? That mix of melodrama and impetuousness that afflicts the young? All the theories and explanations in the binder missed the symbolic significance of the deed, I thought. Was a deeper bite into the fruit of knowledge really what he was meant to do with his life? He kept to the science, yes, but at Berkeley he also learned Sanskrit to read an ancient Hindu text known as the Bhagavad Gita. (That explained the friendship with Latham.) A genius mastering the science of the universe who was also entranced by that same universe’s most insoluble mystery: Why are we here? The loneliest man, indeed.

  Rake, rake. At age thirty, a sudden interest in politics. Radical politics, including communism. “There had to be a girl,” I murmured, an image of Delphine consuming my attention, as brilliant and blinding as a lightning flash. Delphine watching me over the top of her textbook as we studied—attempted to study—in the school library, a secretive smile on her lips. She tilts the book cover (Chemistry for the Modern Age) to reveal another book: Edna St. Vincent Millay’s translation of Flowers of Evil. Brings the book upright, continues reading, her lips now moving silently as she savors every word, every line. Will she pass our chemistry test? She doesn’t care, I don’t care, I give up trying to learn about alkalis and wonder if later, once we desert the library and find a quiet corner, will Delphine whisper a line from Baudelaire in my ear, her breath hot, her tongue like an electric charge—

  “Oppie, Oppie,” I muttered, bringing myself back to Trinity. Sure enough, he had tumbled into radicalism via romance, during a long relationship with a woman named Jean Tatlock. Daughter of a Chaucer scholar, she was a full-time medical student and part-time communist, penning indignant articles for the Western Worker and marching for the rights of migrant farm workers. She recognized the evils of Hitler and Mussolini long before most Americans did, advocating the Popular Front. Fight fascism, empower the workers, defer the revolution—that cocktail intoxicated Oppenheimer. He attended rallies, arranged for Jewish relatives in Germany to emigrate to the States, and cut checks to the Abraham Lincoln Brigade and to the farm workers (“Oppie for Okies,” I couldn’t help but joke to myself). He and Jean socialized with a bevy of California communists. He sponsored a German-born longshoreman named Bernard Peters for graduate study of physics and made him a note taker for one of his classes. With fellow Berkeley professor Haakon Chevalier, he discussed Marxism and French literature. When Scottish-born doctor Tom Addis asked him to give money directly to the Party, Oppenheimer happily obliged. His younger brother Frank, to whom he was close, joined the Party—the binder even had Frank’s roll number and false name (Frank Folsom). No doubt about it, by the late 1930s the brilliant, popular physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer was a radical.

  Oppenheimer loved Jean—more than once, he proposed—but she was given to bouts of depression and sharp mood swings. In 1939, she broke off the engagement. Soon Oppenheimer was seen in the company of a twenty-nine-year-old married woman named Katherine “Kitty” Harrison. Physician Richard Stewart Harrison was her third husband. Her biography rea
d like the notes on a character in a melodrama. Her mother was descended from European royalty—Kitty’s uncle was the king of Belgium—yet she grew up in Pittsburgh. Her first husband was apparently a dope fiend and a homosexual; they were divorced after just a few months. Her second husband, Joe Dallet, had spurned his wealthy upbringing to become a longshoreman and communist organizer. Kitty embraced his politics, living in abject poverty and selling the Daily Worker on the streets of Youngstown, Ohio. The deprivations proved too much, and she bolted. They reconciled in Europe when Joe came to fight in the Spanish Civil War, but he was killed in battle. In November 1938, she married Harrison; by the summer of 1940, she was pregnant with Oppenheimer’s child. Harrison magnanimously agreed to divorce Kitty so she could marry Oppenheimer.

  I couldn’t help but marvel at Oppenheimer’s elegant waltz with the Reds, such a vastly different experience from my own. Where Oppenheimer had written checks and attended lectures, I had pilfered classified documents and learned to do dead drops. For him, communists were lovers and friends, fellow party-goers and do-gooders. He welcomed doctors and dock workers alike into his home. For me, communists were always pseudonymous fellow spies and taciturn, distrustful Russian-born operatives for the N.K.V.D. I led a furtive, illegal, dangerous life, one locked far away from my life as Lieutenant (j.g.) Ellis Voigt, U.S.N.; Oppenheimer glided effortlessly and openly between his radical, personal, and professional realms. He was the star guest at a never-ending garden party, while I was the mole burrowed beneath the green grass. Measuring the contrast didn’t embitter me—I’d made my choices, I had to live with the consequences—but did people like Oppenheimer ever wonder about the subterranean world the communists had tunneled right beneath their feet?

  Another question: had he ever been a dues-paying communist like his younger brother? The damnedest thing was it didn’t matter if he was on the Party’s roll, not with lovers and associates like Tatlock and the rest: Oppenheimer should never have been cleared for a military project. Hell, my only known connection to communism was Rosario Moreno, Delphine’s father, a man I hadn’t seen in eight years. Yet Agent Slater wouldn’t let go of that slender straw—he was determined to bring me down, and as much as I hated him, I couldn’t deny (to myself) that he was right: I’d turned Red because of what happened to Delphine. If all went well, Slater would never expose me, but Oppenheimer had already been exposed as a major security risk. His presence at Site Y, not to mention his friendship with the head of security, meant that he was indispensable. Without Oppenheimer, there was no Trinity, no test, no secret weapon, whatever it was.

  At a quarter after one, I closed the binder and lit yet another Lucky. My ninth of the hour, the butts in the ashtray told me. I was a quick study, but I didn’t have a photographic memory. Even if I did, spewing facts about Oppenheimer wouldn’t impress Brode. Latham was right, Brode was a smart one in an already crowded field. More important, he was shrewd. Wasn’t enough to be a genius to get away with spying for the Reds as long as Brode had, you also had to be clever, a natural reader of people, with a keen nose for sniffing out their ulterior motives. To earn Brode’s trust—or at least to avoid his suspicion—I needed to act like I had nothing to prove when it came to Oppenheimer. It helped that my “role” as an outside security investigator was a secondary one. My leading part was to play a Russian spy, and wasn’t that an assignment that needed no rehearsal?

  Jarowsky fetched me just as I was stubbing out my cigarette.

  “Ready?”

  I nodded. He took the binder and I followed him back down the hallway.

  “Brode will be in here in a few minutes,” he told me, pointing at the room next to the one where I’d been briefed. “The door will be closed. Go in without knocking, close the door immediately. You’ll have five minutes tops. Slip out, shut the door, come back to our room. Don’t say anything til you get a signal—we can’t take a chance of Brode hearing you. Doctor Bainbridge will be coming to get Brode just a few minutes after you leave him, so it won’t be long.”

  “Understood.”

  We went into the briefing room to wait. Latham, Meacham, and Foley were gone. I didn’t ask where and Jarowsky didn’t tell me.

  “What’s the first thing you’re gonna say to Brode?” he asked.

  “‘Get to the ballpark much here?’”

  “Funny guy. For real, though.”

  “How’s this: ‘They think I’m here to interview Oppenheimer.’”

  Jarowsky thought that over. “Yeah, that’s good. Gives your cover but gets him thinking, too.”

  “Thanks.”

  He lit a cigarette, so did I; we smoked in silence. After a moment, he stood and turned on the fan. The papers on the desks undulated with each pass of the fan head.

  “Colonel Latham really allergic to tobacco smoke?” I asked.

  Jarowsky shrugged. “Can’t smoke around him, so yeah, I guess so.”

  “Reason I ask is, when I met with him at his office at Site Y, Oppenheimer was there and he chain-smoked the whole time.”

  He smiled. “Well then, lotsa rules get bent for the professor.”

  Indeed they did. And who was I to question that? I thought about why I’d persuaded Latham to return my weapon, now concealed in a holster beneath my left arm. Even if the Russians wanted me to kill Brode, I couldn’t shoot him, not here, not during the test. But what-ifs kept scratching.

  What if Brode panicked after giving me the copy I’d been ordered to get? What if he tried to take it back from me, believing that the diagram was his only leverage with the Russians? What if during that struggle, Brode tried to seize my weapon, tried to shoot me?

  And what if I shot him first?

  Wild what-ifs, for sure—Brode wasn’t the panicky type. But if I had the opportunity to shoot Brode unobserved, if I was confident I could convince Latham that a struggle had occurred, should I kill the young physicist? Every word I said to Brode that night to get the diagram would be learned by the F.B.I. during their interminable interrogation of Brode. Getting him locked up was all part of my plan, but I hadn’t considered the risks of my contact. To get Brode to talk, Slater and the Bureau would let him know that they didn’t trust me; to save his skin, Brode would feed their suspicions. Jesus, he might even lie and tell the Bureau I had admitted to being a longtime Red agent.

  But if Brode was dead, he couldn’t tell the Bureau anything.

  Stop it! I resolved to banish that thought from my mind. That’s how murderers got caught, by cooking up self-serving schemes that only appeared plausible to themselves. Killing Brode would make me look far more guilty than anything Brode told the Bureau, true or false. A yarn about a struggle, the gun going off, would unravel immediately. No matter what, I had to let Brode live and trust that a successful operation to trick the Russians was all that I needed to block the Bureau from learning who I really was.

  The door swung open, Foley nodded curtly at Jarowsky, and disappeared. Jarowsky looked at me. He held up his wrist, tapped his watch, and raised his right hand, fingers splayed. Five minutes. I ticked my chin and stood.

  As instructed, I opened the door to the adjacent room and strode in, shutting the door behind me. Brode was leaning over a desk and looked up abruptly. His surprise turned to recognition—he remembered me from the interrogation at Site Y.

  “Why are you here?” A challenge, but calmly said. His dark eyebrows were arched, his black hair precisely parted and shiny with Brilliantine.

  I was just about to say They think I’m here to interview Oppenheimer when the obvious connection finally hit me: What if Brode and Oppenheimer were working together to deliver the secret of Site Y to the Russians?

  CHAPTER 36

  I’M—THEY THINK I’M HERE TO INTERVIEW OPPENHEIMER,” I GOT OUT.

  “Oh, you’re a reporter, not a sailor?” His smugness was no act—he looked every bit as self-assured as he sounded. He deftly flipped shut the binder he’d been examining and folded his arms, his gaze first on my face, th
en my nameplate.

  If Oppenheimer’s a spy, he can make sure the Russians get a correct diagram … I tried to shake that dreaded thought, tried to focus. Forced myself to step closer and meet his stare. I said, “To diffuse the Uranium-235, use uranium hexafluoride and a metal filter with submicroscopic perforations, do not use a mass spectrometer.” The exact words he had said in Washington while I covertly listened. I still had no idea what that statement meant, but I knew it was the key to what was about to happen here at Trinity. And quoting it was a surefire way to get Brode’s attention.

  His haughty grin remained. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  How can I pull this off if Oppenheimer’s dirty? Dismay—the crush of looming defeat—distracted me. I felt sucker-punched, but is it even possible to sucker-punch yourself? I’d been a Soviet spy for eight years. How could I have deluded myself into believing that self-extraction was possible?

  “No idea, huh?” I scoffed, buying myself time to regain my concentration. “You can drop the act, Brode—I heard you say those exact words to your Russian contact at the Automat in Washington in May. The old man in work clothes close to your booth? His toolbox was a wireless rig, and I was in the kitchen listening on a headset.”

  The flickering of his eyes hinted at a mind racing through all possible responses, like a chess master surprised by a bold move from an inferior opponent.

  “Whatever you may or may not have observed in Washington is irrelevant,” he said. “There are just two salient facts. One, you didn’t say anything about this alleged Automat encounter during today’s joke of an interrogation. Two, you’re here, alone, to make this charge at a most inopportune moment.”

  Translation: My earlier silence and now sudden appearance were highly irregular, definitely out of step with protocol. Brode was savvy enough to wait for me to tell him why I was violating procedure.

  As much as I needed to engage Brode, I couldn’t avoid more dreaded thoughts. Brode had been able to elude identification as a spy for years, and Oppenheimer had been cleared to direct this project despite his Red-stained past, making them the perfect cell. Both were genius physicists, carrying out work only a handful of other scientists could comprehend. The two could spend—and no doubt had spent—countless hours working together without raising suspicions. Oppenheimer knew he couldn’t leave Site Y without being followed and watched constantly, so had Brode served as the courier? Meanwhile Oppenheimer’s comfortable relationship with Colonel Latham eased security concerns. If General Groves ever questioned Oppenheimer’s loyalty, Latham was there to vouch for him. With Brode as his coconspirator, Oppenheimer could focus on his work, behaving and talking like an innocent man. Was that why the N.K.V.D. had agreed to release me after torturing me, so that I could come to Los Alamos and, without even being aware, receive a coded message from Brode that Oppenheimer wasn’t under suspicion? Maybe the diagram Brode was supposed to give me would include a notation, an equation or a sequence of numbers, that would tell the Russians that Oppenheimer was safe.