‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
‘Don’t be. I don’t need your compassion. I just want you to tell me the truth.’
‘You think I’m lying?’
‘I know you’re lying. And what makes it worse is this. You’ve told yourself you’re lying for the best possible reason. You’re lying to see Eva again. To spend the rest of your lives together. To make a nest away from all this madness. But you know what? It will never happen. Not unless you tell us the truth. Think about that, Stefan. I have to fly to America tonight. We’ll meet again once I’m back.’
24
Merricks couldn’t believe it when Gómez said he was getting married. He’d been back on the Hill for a couple of hours having flown down from DC. Merricks had returned to the office to find him sitting behind the desk. Just like always.
‘Name?’ Merricks asked.
‘Yolanda.’
‘Photo?’
‘It’s in here.’ Gómez tapped his head, then shaped an hour glass with his huge hands.
‘Big?’
‘Me-sized.’
‘And this is a woman?’
‘One of the best.’
‘So how well do you know her?’
‘Not at all. Which I guess makes it an adventure.’
Gómez asked about Marta Fiedler. Merricks said he hadn’t seen her for a while but understood she was on the point of moving out.
‘She’s got friends back in Chicago. There’s a queue of people after that apartment of hers and I guess she’s sick of living with a ghost. Might be good if you happened by. She likes you.’
Gómez nodded. He had a visit in mind. Plus a couple of other questions for Merricks.
‘Can’t they wait?’ Merricks gestured at the mountain of statements on his desk. Last week, there’d been a radiation accident in the metallurgical lab. There were rumours that it had been deliberate and with two guys in hospital in Santa Fe there was no way even Arthur Whyte could ignore it. Carelessness was one thing, deliberate intent quite another.
Gómez wanted to know how Whyte was shaping up.
‘Just the same. Halfway up Oppie’s ass. Oppie knows the schmuck did them a big favour when Fiedler died and Whyte ain’t about to let him forget it. Groves is back in a couple of days. Whyte’s called a departmental meeting. He says the general wants to get one or two things straight.’
‘Like?’
‘He won’t say. If you put money on us being out of line you’re looking at good odds. Ten to one says we’re not doing the job properly. Sound familiar?’
*
It was late afternoon by the time Gómez made it to the Fiedlers’ apartment. Marta’s face brightened the moment she looked out of the window and saw Gómez making for the front door.
‘I thought you’d gone for good.’ She presented her face for a kiss. ‘You promised to send me a postcard.’
‘Did I?’
‘Maybe I made that up. You want some coffee? Something to eat?’
Gómez said yes to both. She made him a sandwich in the kitchen, baloney on rye, while the kettle boiled on the hob. Gómez was relieved to find her so buoyant. This way, the next half-hour might be a whole lot easier than he’d anticipated.
‘You’ve come for a reason,’ she said.
‘Always.’
‘Care to tell me why?’
‘It’s about Sol.’
‘Surprise me. You know what? He comes to see me sometimes, middle of the night, it’s the damnedest thing. I’m lying there asleep and then I feel his presence in the room. He always used to get up around that time to visit the bathroom. A man of routine, my husband. Even now.’
‘You talk?’
‘We do. And always in German. There’s another thing. He looks the way he looked when we first met. He was a little heavier then. America took the weight off him. Or maybe it was the work.’
‘Is he happy?’
‘To see me, you mean?’ Her eyes were shiny. ‘Always. Meine Spatzling. I love that man. I truly do.’
Gómez wanted to take her back a month. It was the weekend. They were both invited to go on a trek around the canyon.
‘In Bandelier?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Sure I remember it. I had a problem with my leg but I told Sol he should go. He wasn’t getting enough exercise. Those other ladies would take care of him. There was no one they liked better.’
‘Why was that?’
‘Because he was sweet and gentle. And because he made them laugh.’
Gómez wanted to know who’d organised the walk.
‘Betty Kerekes. She organises everything. You want to speak with her? I have the address.’
She disappeared into the living room while Gómez finished the sandwich. He heard a drawer open. Then another. When Marta returned, she’d written the address on the back of an envelope. Gómez scanned it quickly. Ten minutes away on foot, he thought. He looked up. She was asking whether he’d had enough to eat.
‘Plenty,’ he said. ‘I have to go.’
She tried to mask her disappointment and smiled gamely when he promised to call back over the next couple of days. Out in the hall, he paused. He gave her a peck on the forehead and held her for a moment.
‘Mind if I ask one last question?’
‘Go ahead.’
‘Were you ever bothered by a coyote?’
‘Here in this house?’
‘Yes.’
‘Never.’
Marta was frowning. Gómez told her not to worry. Then he nodded at the open door to the lounge.
‘I guess it must get lonely,’ he said.
‘Ja. It does.’ Her face was upturned to his. ‘You ever see Frank at all? There’s another man I enjoyed having around. It’s like he’s gone, too.’
Betty Kerekes turned out to be an American married to one of the Hungarian scientists. She was a big woman with two teenage kids and a face made for laughter. When Gómez offered her his ID, she asked what she’d done wrong.
‘Nothing.’
‘This is a social call? Only I have a goulash on the stove out back.’
Gómez explained about his visit to Marta. He needed to check on the last time Sol Fiedler had gone out to the canyon. Betty had been in charge that day.
‘Sure. You’re gonna arrest me for that?’
Gómez shook his head. He wanted to know how much Betty remembered of that day.
‘Everything. It’s all up here.’ She tapped her head. ‘Try me.’
‘How many people went?’
‘Three cars.’ She was counting her fingers. ‘About fifteen of us.’
‘And you were there all afternoon?’
‘Pretty much.’
‘You walk together? Stay tight?’
‘Always. House rules.’
‘No stragglers?’
‘No. We’re like one of those Atlantic convoys. Always move at the pace of the slowest.’ She paused, frowning. ‘This is about poor Sol? Sol Fiedler?’
‘It is.’
‘He was the slowest, by far, and I guess pretty much the oldest so no one’s blaming him. You want to see some pictures I took? Only Sol’s in most of them.’
She pulled Gómez into the house but left the door open. Her kids were due back any moment. With luck, her husband might make it by nightfall. She was rummaging through a cardboard box on the floor. At last she laid hands on the photo she wanted.
‘There. Second on the right.’
Gómez found himself looking at a group of walkers peering into the sun. They were mainly women and the grins on their faces suggested the walk was over. Sol Fiedler was in the front row, right beside Betty. At the back Gómez recognised Arthur Whyte’s wife, her blonde hair neatly piled on top of her head.
‘I just need to get this right,’ Gómez said. ‘You walked round the canyon? All of you?’
‘We did.’
‘And stayed in a group?’
‘Sure.’
‘And that group included Sol?’
‘Yep. In fact he was with me the whole way round. He was telling me about the old days in Berlin and how sad he was that he and Marta had to leave in such a hurry. They had a little money before the Nazis stole it and they had plans, too. You know what’s so sad about that man? He never left Berlin. Not once. That’s how dedicated he was to his research. They wanted to see so much more of the country. Munich. The Black Forest. Hamburg. And now it’s too late.’
Gómez nodded. He asked whether he could borrow the photo.
‘Sure. Give it to Marta if you want.’ She was staring down at the photo. ‘You know what? That’s probably the last shot anyone ever took of the guy.’
*
The Direktor was back from America by the weekend. For three days, Stefan had done nothing but lie on his bed and read. A package of books, all of them in German, had been delivered by one of the guards with no indication of where they might have come from, but Stefan detected the hand of his latest interrogator, not least because one of them contained a scrawled signature at the front that Stefan tried on Hans.
‘Ever heard of Guy Liddell?’
‘He’s the boss. The big man.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Ja.’
Stefan was halfway through Der Weg zurück when he was summoned back to the house. It was late afternoon, not a cloud in the sky, and the temperature was beginning to drop.
The Direktor was waiting for him in the big upstairs room. He looked exhausted but did his best to summon a smile. Stefan thanked him for the books. He was reading the Remarque. It felt strange to have time to give a book the attention it deserved.
‘What do you make of Tjaden? Might he be touching a nerve or two?’
Tjaden was the book’s central character. He returned from the Great War to find a society he didn’t recognise. Chaos and corruption everywhere and a deep pessimism that started to rot his soul.
‘Not with me,’ Stefan said. ‘Not yet, anyway.’
‘Glad to hear it.’
The Direktor wanted to talk about Sol Fiedler.
‘Were you aware of the nature of his work in Berlin?’
‘No.’
‘He never discussed it?’
‘Never. It would have been pointless. I’m a sailor not a scientist and he knew that.’
‘Was there ever any suggestion on his part that this work might have been delicate?’
‘Delicate how?’
‘Delicate in terms of consequences, of outcomes?’
‘Absolutely not.’
‘No mention of a super-weapon?’
‘No.’
‘Not even when he got to America?’
‘No.’ Stefan frowned. ‘Super-weapon?’
The Direktor took the subject no further. Instead, he asked Stefan for a frank assessment of where, exactly, his half-brother’s loyalties lay.
‘Not with the regime, obviously. He found the Nazis beyond his comprehension. They disgusted him. And they frightened him, too.’
‘How about his colleagues?’
‘I think that was probably different. My guess is that his loyalty was always to science. I think he sometimes worried that the science would fall into the wrong hands. He never had much time for politicians.’
‘That’s quite a sophisticated judgement.’
‘On his part?’
‘On yours, Kapitän. To be frank I’m having difficulty trying to understand exactly how well you really knew this man. You say you met over a single weekend.’
‘Two weekends.’
‘Two weekends. And after that there arrived a handful of letters.’
‘Three, I think.’
‘All of which have disappeared.’
‘Yes.’
‘So no corroboration. No photographs, for instance.’
‘There were photos. My mother took some. I never mentioned that.’
‘But I expect they’ve gone, too.’
‘That’s right.’ Stefan nodded. ‘In the firestorm.’
The Direktor shook his head and then got to his feet. Stefan wondered why he’d gone to the States, who he’d seen and what kind of light a couple of days of meetings and conversations might have thrown on this story of his.
‘We need to be honest with each other.’ The Direktor was standing by the window. ‘As you may have guessed, I’ve been intimately involved with our country’s counter-intelligence service for a number of years. From time to time our counterparts in the Reich mount operations against us. They send in agents. They often arrive by parachute. These people are always ill-prepared. They are very easy to pick up and when we exert a little pressure their stories fall apart. Why? Because of a lack of attention to detail. Speaking personally, I’ve always found that puzzling. Germans are famed for their practicality. For the way they put things together. But perhaps they restrict this talent to the objects they physically build. When it comes to my world, their failure is a failure of imagination. They can’t make that leap.’
‘You mean they can’t lie.’
‘Yes. To make a fiction work you need lots of lies and you need to be careful how you put them together. It’s a talent that Herr Goebbels has but I’ll wager he’s the exception. When it becomes to deception, to crafting the lies that will keep you alive, your people are mere apprentices.’
Stefan was wondering how much of this he should take personally. The Direktor hadn’t finished. He said there was one exception to the rule, a spymaster who’d survived the murderous chaos of Hitler’s inner circle, identified the right patron and risen to the top of Himmler’s SS empire. This man, he ventured, was an operator of genius. He was highly educated. He’d never been tainted by the rougher elements of the regime. He spoke a number of languages. And he had an extremely supple brain.
‘Does he have a name, this person?’
‘Yes. And I suspect you know him, Stefan. Or, at the very least, that you’ve met him. His name is Schellenberg. Walter Schellenberg. And you’ll remember him, dare I suggest, because he’s our kind of man. This story of yours has his fingerprints all over it. And that, I might add, is a compliment.’
Stefan knew he was in trouble. To his knowledge, he hadn’t made a single mistake. He’d been fluent and plausible. He’d given these people exactly what he’d been fed in Coruña, in exactly the right doses, yet somehow the Direktor had seen through it all.
‘Tell me more about the super-weapon,’ Stefan said.
‘I can’t. Because I don’t know.’
‘You think Sol may be working on it?’
‘Sol is dead.’
‘Dead?’
‘You should be taking that personally, Stefan. He’s supposed to be a relative of yours.’
Stefan sat back, closed his eyes. Was this the moment he confessed all? He thought not.
‘As you say, I barely knew him.’ He did his best to muster an apologetic shrug.
*
General Groves arrived at Los Alamos a day early after a summons to Washington and an abrupt change to his schedule. Arthur Whyte, who’d been making elaborate plans for the general to address a smallish audience of hand-picked scientists, was caught off-balance. He’d detected a brewing crisis in a 06.00 a.m. phone conversation with one of the Manhattan Project team at the Pentagon, and he was never at his best in the face of uncertainty. All he knew for sure was that Groves was demanding a private conference the moment he arrived with just four named individuals: himself, Oppenheimer, Whyte and Gómez.
‘Why you?’
Gómez was sitting in Whyte’s office. He’d been half expecting a development like this but was impressed by the speed of events. Less than a week ago he’d been driving across the border with the body of a man in the trunk of a lime-green Caddy. Now, the most powerful players on the national stage were gathering to figure out the consequences.
‘I asked you a question, Gómez. Something to hide here?’
‘Nothing, sir.’
‘How was the vacation?’
> ‘Fine. Got to see a lot of places. Met a few new people. Glad to be back.’
Whyte didn’t believe a word. His conversation with the Pentagon suggested a major breach of security on the Hill. It was deeply uncomfortable to receive this news so early in the morning and have nothing to say in response.
‘You been talking to any Bureau people? Because Groves will want to know.’
‘I have friends, buddies from way back. That’s allowed.’
‘So what do you talk about?’
‘All kinds of stuff. Old times. Folks we know.’ He shrugged. ‘A man on vacation’s entitled to a conversation or two.’
‘This isn’t helping, Gómez.’
‘Helping who, sir?’
‘Any of us. And that includes you. The FBI have no jurisdiction here, as you well know. That was the deal from the start and General Groves has fought like a lion to keep it intact. I happen to be one of the few people he’s confided in. He’s got Hoover running to the President behind his back and all kinds of other coons just waiting for us to fall flat on our fannies. You think that time has come, Gómez? You think that’s what this is about?’
‘I’ve no idea.’
‘You’re lying, Gómez.’
‘Care to tell me why, sir?’
‘Because this has to be about Fiedler. Am I right?’
Gómez said nothing. Rule one. Let silence sweat the perp.
‘Talk to me, Gómez. Tell me I’m wrong. Fiedler was a basket case. The pressure had got to him. He’d figured what lies at the end of the line once this thing is operational and he couldn’t live with that kind of headline. Plus the guy was creeping around other women. Like my wife. You dispute any of that?’
‘Plenty.’
‘Like what? Like he couldn’t cope with a million deaths?’
‘He had misgivings. A lot of them do. That’s why they sit around and try and figure out a way of keeping their conscience clean now they’ve pretty much done their work. Stage a demo for the Nips, for the Russians, for anyone who cares to watch. Show the world what’s round the goddam corner. You’re right. The guy had a conscience. That’s what made him a human being. But that’s not enough for him to put a gun to his head.’
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