Making History

by Rick Wilber

  He was awake now, and sharp, thinking it through. Ten minutes more, maybe fifteen, and the moment might come as the speech ended and the questions started.

  Then there was a quick rap at the lecture room door and everyone watched as the door opened and a man in a suit, a blond German missing his right arm so he was, no doubt, a veteran of one front or another who’d found something useful to do for the local Gestapo or the embassy.

  They were all watching, thirty-six of the brightest minds in European physics outside of the missing, and brilliant, Jews, as the man walked over and handed Heisenberg a note then clicked his heels officiously, spun around and walked briskly back out the door.

  Heisenberg was expressionless, the blank look on his face something he must have mastered after years in the service of Hitler. “Excuse me, please,” he said and turned his back to the room to read the note.

  Did his shoulders sag a bit as he finished? Berg thought maybe so, but Heisenberg was smiling thinly as he turned back to face his audience.

  “Colleagues, I have received information to the effect that Baron von Rundstedt’s Sixth Panzer has broken through at Bastogne and is racing toward Antwerp. I have been asked to relay this information to you. There is more I would like to say about this turn of events, but this is, of course, neither the time nor the place.”

  And he turned his back to the room again and walked over to the chalkboard. There was no “Heil Hitler,” and instead, he started furiously writing formulae for the S-matrix discussion, scribbling on the chalkboard in Zurich while Von Rundstedt’s tanks rumbled toward Antwerp and the oil tanks filled with fuel that sat there, nearly defenseless, ready to be milked. If this news was right, the war might go on for years, giving Germany time to finish a bomb, and build the rockets to deliver it. Well, all the more reason to listen closely for some hint. Any hint.

  Heisenberg finished and put the chalk onto the narrow tray at the bottom of the board before walking back to the podium and asking for questions. This, Berg hoped, would tell the tale.

  But it didn’t. Paul Scherrer wanted to know about Ads/CFT correspondence and Heisenberg went into a long, rambling response that amounted to “We’d all like to know the answer to that.” Then Wentzel got into a question about the analyticity of the first, and Heisenberg went back to the chalkboard to erase the previous formulae and put up some new ones, talking as he jotted them down, explaining things. There were lots of nods and murmurs.

  This went on, but never in the direction that Berg was hoping for. It wasn’t going to be that easy. There was, ultimately, no hint of anything else, anything that mattered. Berg left the Beretta taped where it was and was left, in the end, to wonder if Von Rundstedt’s success was enough on its own to require the death of Heisenberg? Maybe, just maybe.

  When the questions ended Heisenberg looked tired but relieved. He thanked everyone and then Scherrer returned to the podium and thanked them all for coming. There would be a reception at 7 p.m. at Scherrer’s house tonight, #27 Versterstrasse, in District 2 on the west side of the lake. They were all invited.

  The audience stood and gave Heisenberg another polite round of applause as he exited, and then, slowly, chatting with one another all the while, started heading for the one open door. It was a slow process.

  Berg was lost in thought as he ambled slowly in line. He’d heard nothing that had given him a definitive reason to pull the trigger; but the question had changed, really, and now he had to factor in a longer war. He needed a little time to think it through. Heisenberg would be at Scherrer’s party later tonight, and then another reception tomorrow at the German embassy. Heisenberg liked long, contemplative walks and he’d be coming and going on foot to these social occasions. Berg had two opportunities to kill him, then. The first one was tonight, probably in Backer Park on Hohlstrasse, which stood between the Baur a lac hotel and Scherrer’s home. It would be dark. It would be very easy.

  And if not there and then, tomorrow would do, but that was trickier, in the daylight. That would have to be a sidewalk encounter, one shot, very clean, and then try to disappear into the crowd.

  But, first, in either case he had to decide, and he needed a little time to puzzle it through. It would be good to talk to Heisenberg first somehow, perhaps at tonight’s party, get a feel for things, all of it very sociable. And then, maybe, kill him. Berg had never killed a man, but that was what most of the training had been for. That moment. Pull the trigger. Save the world. Maybe.

  He was just out the door and into the hallways when he felt a touch on his left shoulder, heard a deep, warm female voice speaking very quietly in German: “Yes, you must decide, Moe –may I call you Moe? –and very soon. So much hangs in the balance, yes?”

  He turned to look at her. She was nearly his height and even more attractive up close, perhaps in her mid-thirties, black hair, not a lot of makeup, some real strength of character showing in how she looked right back at him, assessing him just as he did the same to her.

  He steered them both out of the queue and down a side hallway. No use pretending: “I saw you in Chicago. And then in London, Paris, Rome. And now here. What gives?”

  She smiled. “And the answer better be a good one or you’ll use that Beretta on me, right, Moe? But only after you’ve dropped your pants and untaped it.” She laughed. “Sometimes you do better, you know, Moe. Sometimes you have untaped it and you’re ready to go.”

  So she knew about the Beretta. What the hell?

  They walked back into the main hall and then, quietly, with everyone else, out of the building and onto the Zweillerstrasse. She chatted briefly about the weather; colder than last year, no?

  Berg could be patient. She knew way too much, but he was about to find things out, and there was nothing he liked better than learning.

  Finally, at the far end of the Hottingen bridge, near the dark park, they’d left the crowd behind and, alone, they stopped to lean on the railing and look at the cold water below, ice just starting to form on the rocks that rose above the stream.

  “I have something to tell you, Moe,” she said. “It is very important.”

  “Sure,” he said, “it’s important,” but they both knew he wasn’t about to believe anything she said, not without establishing who she was and who she worked for.

  “I work for a firm that you don’t know anything about yet, Moe,” she said, reading his mind again. “And later tonight I’m going to tell you about our firm. You won’t believe me, of course, but then I’ll prove it to you. I’ll also prove to you that Werner Heisenberg has to die, and soon.

  “Tonight, after the little party at Scherrer’s house. You must walk with Heisenberg through the park, chatting about the S-matrix and, perhaps, the weather. There will be no talk of the war, or the super-bomb. There in the park, at a spot I will take you by in a few minutes, you must use your Beretta to shoot Heisenberg. It must take three shots to make certain he is dead. The first shot has to be above the left ear. The second, as he begins to crumple, has to be to the back of the head. The third, as he lies there, face up, must be to the forehead. You will be wearing your gloves in the cold, so there will be no need to wipe the weapon. You will simply toss it into the nearby bushes and walk away.”

  Berg stared at her for a few moments. He wished like hell he’d put the Beretta in his pocket. “You know a lot. Too damn much, in fact.”

  “I do know a lot, Moe. I know everything in this line, in fact, from this point forward. You, me, Heisenberg, the Bomb, lives saved and lives lost. It’s all right there in front of me, like reading a newspaper, as long as you stay here. You like reading the newspaper, don’t you, Moe?”

  He did, in fact, like reading the newspaper, liked it so much he bought two or three each day and read them slowly over coffee in the morning, savoring the easy enjoyment of reading the paper, where everything was solidly black and white, clear-cut, sharp-edges, clean. Very clean.

  She stared at him, dead serious. “Problem is, Moe, there are a lot
of pages in those newspapers, and different things are happening on different pages. It’s all on the same day, it’s all the news that’s fit to print, you know? But certain things have to go in a certain order, Moe, or I won’t be able to help.”

  He moved to her, pressed himself against her, reaching down to put his right hand over her left one on the bridge railing. A moment of dizziness and he thought he might go this knees, but he steadied. Then he thought he could kill her now if he had to. Knock her back over the railing and into the water. Get the Beretta as she lay there. Walk down, fire once or twice, then walk away.

  She smiled, pressed back with her hips, looked at him closely. “Look up, Moe, and toward the south, back across the bridge.”

  He stared at her.

  “It’s all right, Moe. You’re the one with the gun taped to his balls. Me, I’m just one of the girls. Go ahead, look up.”

  So he did, and saw, in the night sky, a half-dozen planes of some kind, nearly silent, swift, rushing over Zurich.

  “Whose are they?”

  “German fighters, Moe. Jet fighters, a whole new kind of airplane.”

  “Yeah. So?”

  “You know, Moe, you know very well. Those fighters are better than anything the Allies have. And there’s a jet bomber that’s in trials right now. A month, maybe less, and it will be in production. It has a range of six-thousand miles, Moe. You know what that means.”

  He did know. “How’d you know those fighters would be there?” She was, perhaps, a Nazi, a double-agent of some kind. Christ, this was complicated.

  “I’ve seen them before, Moe. Several times. And I’ve seen the bomber in action, too. I’ve seen it carry a super-bomb, Moe. For six-thousand miles.”

  It was ridiculous, sure. But those fighters. And the stuff she seemed to know. “Look, I don’t get it. Who the hell are you?”

  “I’m someone like you, Moe. Someone who believes in a world that can be better than this one. Someone willing to do what I must to stop this evil before it ruins everything.”

  He pushed against her, harder, squeezed that hand against the railing. Jesus, he was getting worked up by doing this, by pressing against her. Women didn’t usually get this kind of rise out of him.

  He felt her hips push back against him. She smiled. “There’s a lot I can’t tell you yet, Moe. There’s a lot you’re going to have to find out for yourself. But we’re on the same side, you and me, and I can tell you this. There was a freighter in Lorient two months ago, the Bremen.”

  “I know about the Bremen and the deuterium.”

  “But you’ve been told there was a commando raid and the Bremen was sunk, Moe.”

  How the hell? “Yeah,” he admitted, “that’s what I’ve been told. So no heavy water means no plutonium means no super-bomb, at least not anytime soon. It would take another year for them to isolate more.”

  He paused. “But if this Von Rundstedt thing is true and there’s more time to isolate more deuterium…”

  Now she wasn’t smiling. She pushed him back off her and he let it happen, releasing her hand from the bridge rail, pulling back. “It’s worse than that, Moe. They’d offloaded more than twenty tons of the heavy water before the raid. The Germans were happy the Bremen was sunk, it lets the Allies think the Uranverein can’t make the super-bomb. But the Allies are wrong, Moe. Terribly wrong.”

  “So they can make enough plutonium for a bomb,” he said, flatly.

  “Yes. Maybe two bombs, Moe. Two of them! Maybe the first for London, and the second for who knows where. New York?”

  “It’s too late already?” He believed her now, but if this was true why kill Heisenberg?

  “Certain matters are at a critical point, Moe. At the moment, the bomb they are building is too big to be useful: it’s the size of a boxcar, maybe bigger. And to keep it hidden it’s been built in caves in Zugspitze. You know where that is, in Bavaria.”

  She said that with certainty. He nodded.

  “Heisenberg is personally working on ways around the problem, Moe. He can’t be allowed to succeed.”

  Did Heisenberg even want to succeed? That was really the question, thought Berg, but he didn’t voice it.

  “And if I kill Heisenberg this will end it? The bomb won’t be used? The Nazis will finally lose this war?”

  “It will slow things down, Moe. And in the world as it is right now, right here, there’s a chance. If Rommel doesn’t take Cairo, and if Patton wheels west and turns for Amsterdam. Yes, there’s a chance that might end it here. But for you, Moe, no, this is not the end of it.”

  He looked at her. “I don’t know what you mean. What’s next?”

  “I have to go now, Moe. See,” she said, pointing at nothing, a park bench maybe over at the edge of the grass, “there’s a door. I have a deadline and I can’t possibly be late.”

  She turned to face him, reached up with both hands to hold his face, brought him to her, so close, so very close. “You’re going to like this, Moe. You’re going to do important work.” And then she finally kissed him; hard and long, before pulling away and turning to leave him.

  “Sure,” he said to her back as her heels clicked against the stone path. “Sure, it’s important work.” He raised his voice. “Hey, what the hell does that mean? And who the hell are you? I don’t even know your name.”

  She stopped, turned around. “You’ll know everything sometime soon, Moe, I promise you. You’re important. Know that, Moe Berg. Know that you’re important.”

  “I’ll see you again?”

  “Oh, yes, in a way. After all, we have a lot to do, you and I.”

  She turned back again and stepped off the stone path to walk through the brown, winter grass and into the darkness of the park and then she wasn’t there.

  Berg undid his belt and reached down to his groin to pull free the Beretta. There was a brief moment of pain as the athletic tape came free and then he had the gun and was buttoning up again and putting it into his pocket. The smart thing to do was get to Scherrer’s house and get back on the job: find Heisenberg, talk to the man, make a damn decision.

  But where the hell had that woman gone? He wanted to know. He needed to know, in fact, and so he pulled the Beretta back out of his pocket and began walking after her: across the cold, winter grass and along the route he’d seen her take through some bushes and next to that plane tree.

  There was a tingle, that dizziness, that moment of nausea, a sense of something –electricity? –in the air, but nothing else. She was gone. No footprints in the grass, no way to guess how she’d gone. Hell.

  It was cloudy, dark, with snow starting to fall. But Scherrer’s house had to be that way, through this little park and down onto the Seestrasse and on to toward the lake. Hadn’t the sky been clear a moment ago? Oh, hell. He pulled up his coat collar, shoved the Beretta back into the coat pocket, and started walking.

  ***

  August 12, 1944

  Moe Berg and his two pals, Enrico Fermi and Paul Scherrer, sat in slat wooden folding chairs at a very shaky wooden table at the Café Maggiore in the Swiss village of Dinella. About two-hundred meters away, to the west, was the border with Italy, where Moe and Enrico had left their bikes. The act of their leaving the bikes behind had pleased both the Italian Carabinieri and the Swiss Border Guards, who had each barely glanced at Fermi’s and Berg’s passport before waving them through. It was hard to believe there was a war on.

  Berg smiled a bit and allowed himself a moment’s satisfaction. Here they were, all three with beer steins in front of them and Scherrer smoking a cigarette, calm and serene as they could be, looking out over Lake Maggiori with Lucarno visible in the distance across the lake. Blue skies and sunshine; a light, cool breeze off the lake to cut the summer heat as the three men –two of them among the world’s finest physicists and one of them a mediocre baseball player –discussed how to save the world.

  They were the only patrons at the little café, and the owner who was the waiter and also the coo
k had brought them their beer and gone in to make their sandwiches, so they felt free to talk almost openly.

  “Thank you both for coming. I know it was a difficult journey. But I have news of a certain opportunity.”

  “Something involving Heisenberg?” Moe asked. This must be good or Scherrer wouldn’t have gone to all this trouble.

  “Yes, my old friend, Werner. He’s being allowed to visit with us in a few months.”

  “You’re joking,” said Fermi. “Germany would never allow such a thing. Hitler himself would have to know and he would never allow Werner to travel.”

  “I thought so myself, Enrico, for the longest time. But then one of my students, a brilliant young woman, of all things, pointed out that we could play to Hitler’s vanity. And so we concocted a seminar series and asked Werner to come be our first speaker at the ETH.”

  “And this worked?” Berg asked, incredulous.

  Scherrer smiled. “I brought you something to see,” he said as he took a final drag on his cigarette, stubbed it out in the clay ashtray, and reached into the front inside pocket of his jacket.

  For a second, Berg thought Scherrer might be reaching for a weapon; but that was silly, they were all friends here, right? And, indeed, it was simply a letter, still in its envelope though that had been opened.

  Scherrer handed it to Berg, said “Open it, my friend. It’s from Werner Heisenberg.”

  Well, well. Berg pulled the cut top of the envelope wide and pulled out the letter. It was a letter, written in ink, in a very nice hand. In German, of course.

  Berg read it aloud, in low tones, but loud enough that Fermi could hear.

  My Dear Paul,

  I hope this finds you well, and safe and healthy, in your comfortable surroundings in Zurich.

  Life here is sometimes difficult, as you might imagine, with the war dragging on and the occasional worries over Allied bombing. We are safe enough here at the moment, away from anything that might be thought a worthy target of Mr. Churchill’s or Mr. Truman’s aircraft, but I do worry over the family’s safety. We all must make our sacrifices for the Fatherland, but I would happily risk my own life to save those of my wife and children. I am grateful that Herr Hitler has, twice now, allowed me to keep my family with me as we have moved our facilities from place to place to find a secure facility where we can work.