“What’s up, Doc?” I said, remnants of carrot still fresh in my teeth.
“Ah,” Walker gasped. He didn’t look or sound like Elmer Fudd. “Mr. Peters … I … what are you … where is …?”
“I am dirty and hungry and he is not here,” I said. “What are you doing here?”
“I’m supposed to pick up … some things from Professor Einstein to take to the Institution,” he said nervously. “They’re in the study.”
“Hold on, Doc,” I said, getting up, milk bottle in one hand, gun in the other, face a Brillo grey. “No one touches anything till we see the great man.”
“You don’t think …” Walker began, his hand going to his chest.
“Usually I don’t, but I’m working hard on it right now. Let’s not argue here. I spent the night on the floor of a fur vault with a snoring dentist and bad dreams. The guy who locked me in that vault told me he was on his way here to turn Einstein into a martyr or meat sauce. So, don’t touch anything and don’t irritate me. I don’t have the tolerance or the intelligence to deal with either one.”
“It’s Saturday,” Walker said, looking at me and adjusting his jacket and tie. “Professor Einstein is probably out on his boat.”
“Boat?”
“He sails a boat?”
“What else does one sail?” Walker asked reasonably, while I tried to imagine the fuzzy-haired scientist with a yachtsman’s cap on his head and wearing a navy-blue jacket with gold buttons embossed with little anchors. I couldn’t do it. There was a phone on a small table at the foot of the stairs. I put the milk bottle down, riffled through the pages, and found the number I was looking for. The operator connected me with the house across the street, but Spade and Archer didn’t answer. No one answered. I hung up.
“Let’s go,” I said. “Get me to him fast.”
“But …”
I finished off the milk and motioned him to the door. “Now,” I said, and he believed me.
We drove through Princeton and into farmland. Black-and-white cows paused in their chewing to look stupidly at us as we shot up the two-lane road in silence. I passed the time by rubbing my thumb over my chin and not thinking. Thinking had never really worked for me. My plans usually fell through, confused me. Blundering ahead, trying to touch all the bases twice, and sticking my head up every once in a while to draw the bad guys into taking a wild shot or two had been my method in the past. So far I’d survived with it. So I decided that the best thing to do was find Einstein, get him out in the open, watch for Povey, and hope for help from the FBI.
Walker said, “Here,” about five seconds before he turned into a side road, and I looked for the lake between the trees. We shot through the thin forest and into a parking lot next to a golf course, beyond which was the lake. Walker had said it was a little lake. It looked about the size of Manhattan to me. Little boats with sails lulled around in the stiff breeze and they all looked the same.
I jumped out of the car as soon as it stopped. “Which one?”
Walker, at last sensing urgency, leaped out and scanned the small fleet.
“I don’t …” he began, and a golf ball shot past us, missing my head by about two feet. A thin kid carrying a bag of golf clubs slung over his back came across the parking lot toward us, the clubs jangling above his shoulder.
“Sorry,” the kid shouted. “Where did it go?”
Walker pointed to a ball that had come to rest against the tire of a black Ford.
“Over here, Dr. Carlisle,” the kid shouted, and Dr. Carlisle, six irons in his pudgy little hand, came storming past us. He wore a little white cap, a checkered sweater and white pants. His bottom bounced as he moved seriously toward the Ford.
“Goddamn,” Carlisle muttered as he passed us, “I hate this game.”
I put my hand out and grabbed his arm. I got a fuzzy handful of sweater but it was enough to stop him. Carlisle, red-faced and angry, looked up at me.
“Let go of me,” he said. “Do you know what you’ve got a grip on?”
“Reality,” I said.
“No,” he said through clean teeth. “The sweater of A. J. Carlisle. And that is a mistake.”
“Zipping a ball past my head and not apologizing is also a mistake,” I said, moving my grip from his sleeve to his collar.
“Mr. Peters,” Walker said. “We’re here for …”
“Einstein,” I said, without taking my eyes from Carlisle.
The caddy had returned. From the corner of my eye I could see that he held a putter in his hand. “Let Dr. Carlisle go,” the caddy said.
“Or what?” I asked.
“Or I’ll put your head into that sewer,” said the caddy. “And I play a hell of a lot better golf than the Doc.”
“Peters,” Walker urged. “Professor Einstein.”
“That’s it,” said Carlisle, trying to straighten his sweater when I let him go. “You’re friends of that Nazi.”
“What Nazi?” I said, reaching out for Carlisle again, but the golfer had taken refuge behind the skinny caddy, who held up the putter to ward me off.
“White-haired guy,” said the caddy. “Dr. Carlisle almost hit him on three.”
“Three has a hell of a dog leg,” explained Carlisle. “And who knew he’d be wandering around on the course.”
“He was on the sidewalk near the hot dog stand,” the caddy explained.
“How long ago?” I asked, stepping forward and ignoring the putter.
“Half hour, maybe more,” said the caddy.
Walker and I left them standing in the parking lot, and I imagined a sudden rain of wet concrete covering them and leaving a statue for all to drive around for the next decade or so. Behold, the famous Golfer Cowering Behind a Caddy with a Putter. Note the Norman Rockwell touch, the nostalgic realism of the rumpled sweater. And for those who looked carefully, there would be the ball at their feet waiting forever for Carlisle’s next assault.
We hurried past the clubhouse and down to the dock, where about fifteen sailboats were moored. “Can you sail one of those things?” I asked Walker.
“No, I’ll try to find someone who can.” Before I could stop him he was racing back to the clubhouse. I ran down to the dock and onto its grey planks. At the end of the dock I looked out, hoping to see something, Einstein, Povey, a passing water taxi.
“Mr. Peters?” came a voice behind me. I turned and found myself facing Albert Einstein in rumpled white pants and a light-blue sweater over an unstarched white shirt.
“Someone’s trying to kill you,” I said, looking around for Povey.
“I know,” said Einstein, walking past me to a sailboat tied to the dock. “A golfer. I do not understand the game of golf. Too direct. Too much on a line. You hit. You walk. You hit again. And each time you play, you try to hit it fewer times than the time before.” He climbed into the boat, holding the edge of the dock for balance. While he talked, he began to untie the sail.
“There must come a point at which the person is no longer able to reduce that number. One would think that a point would come at which one could go no faster. But wait. Perhaps a fraction of a second today, a fraction of a second tomorrow. Or perhaps someone else will be a fraction of a second faster. And perhaps someday there will be a golfer who can put the ball on the tether …”
“Tee,” I corrected, looking around for Povey, my hand ready to go to my gun, even though I knew I was no match for Povey’s shooting.
“Tee, yes,” said Einstein, as if he thought the word tee was an important discovery. “There will be a day when someone can hit the ball off each tee directly into the hole. What then? What will be the goal? The thrill? To do it faster? With blindfolds?” He started to untie the line that held the boat to the dock.
“I’m casting off,” he said. “You may climb in with me and sail, or remain on the dock in a state of puzzlement.”
I clambered into the boat, almost tipping it over. No Povey. No Walker in sight.
“Push us away,”
said Einstein, reaching into his pocket for a pipe, which he placed between his teeth.
I obeyed and looked at him. “You don’t believe me,” I said.
“Oh, I believe you,” replied Einstein, “but I don’t see that panic will make the situation less tense. For more than twenty years I have worked and planned, and Nazis have made me run and hide and move and worry. Politics are a waste. You have been paid an agreed-upon fee to both clear my reputation and give protection. Today I sail, Nazis or no Nazis. I sail.”
We sailed.
Well, Einstein sailed while I watched the shore, the sky, passing boats, and anything that glittered in the noonday sun. Something did catch the light back beyond the dock. I thought it was a golfer, possibly Carlisle rocketing golf balls at unwary travelers. “Let’s talk,” I suggested.
“Let us sail,” replied Einstein, puffing on his pipe, his wiry curls of white hair billowing in the breeze.
“Povey is around here somewhere,” I said calmly.
Einstein nodded his head in calm understanding.
“If something happens, go overboard and swim for the dock,” I told him. He shook his head a gentle “no.”
“I do not swim,” he said. “I sail.”
We were heading for something. He kept checking by looking around the flapping sail. I sat low in the small boat and had trouble seeing what we were heading for, but see it I did when we were within a dozen feet of the black rock jutting into the water.
“Watch out for the rock!” I shouted at Einstein, who calmly smiled and nodded as if he were in his study working on some problem.
The wind hit the sail, slapping it back. I ducked before the damn thing hit me and turned as we came within inches of the rock. I could hear the wake of the little sailboat lap against the rock. Einstein was smiling contentedly.
“Anything else you want to play games with?” I asked. “A land mine maybe, or a minesweeper? You’re not the only one who can’t swim. I mean I can swim … a little, but I couldn’t make it ten yards if I had to drag you along.” I pictured myself laboring through the water, maybe trying to reach the rock, with Einstein floating on his back, his pipe in his mouth, his hands folded peacefully on his chest while he looked up into infinity.
“I got my idea for what people call relativity while on a sailboat,” Einstein said with a small shake of his head, as if he remembered the moment well and regretted it at least a little. “I imagined a man on a dock, a bigger dock than the one here, and another approaching him in a boat. I could even imagine two lighthouses. You see the idea came not from the form of a mathematical formula but in the imagination, in pictures. The proof, ah, there are those who say there is no proof. But that,” he said with a wave of the pipe he had removed from his mouth, “is the past. It is the present, the future we must talk of.”
“We’re going to hit that boat,” I said, calmly nodding at the larger motor boat moving toward us. “Across the bow.”
The use of the word “bow” exhausted my nautical knowledge. It was now up to the sailor-scientist.
With another wave, Einstein dismissed the possibility of collision and went on talking as we shot in front of the bigger boat. “This Povey,” he said softly. “He doesn’t know why they want me dead. He is a token, a pawn, and I am …”
“A knight,” I said.
“Maybe a bishop,” Einstein corrected. “He thinks they want me dead only because I am a Jew. No, they want me dead because they think I am working on their destruction, working on a weapon so powerful that it would end this war in one day, one morning, one hour. And they are working on the same weapon. Does this frighten you, as it frightens me, Mr. Peters?”
“It has not brought a new ray of sunshine into my already dim and busy day,” I said, my eye on a boat about our size heading toward us. Far beyond the boat, on the shore, a tall man looked out at us. I couldn’t tell who it was, but he was about the size and shape of Mark Walker. “Watch out for that boat heading our way,” I added.
Einstein seemed not to hear. He had a tale to tell and I wasn’t going to get in the way. “Ten years ago,” he said, as much to himself and the sky as to me, “a young man came to me and said my ideas about energy and mass could be used to create a weapon, a bomb in which almost any material with mass could be converted and start a reaction so that a small bomb might destroy a city.”
“A city?” I asked, humoring the old man while I studied the boat approaching us.
“I told him he was mad,” Einstein laughed. I didn’t see anything funny in the story, but he was a genius. Who the hell knows what geniuses think is funny.
“And now …” Einstein wrote on, “and now I find myself urging this country to make such a weapon and offering my help. But they turn me down. You know why?” He didn’t wait for my answer. “Because I was once a German. My fear of German aggression, German hatred, was with me when I was a boy. I ran to Italy, renounced my German citizenship when the United States was giving away my secrets to the Germans. But you see, Mr. Peters, your friend Povey and his friends do not know this. They think, not unreasonably, that the man who made popular the idea of converting mass to energy, a man who is the enemy of the German state, must be working on such a weapon. And they are wrong. I am working for the Navy on something of far less importance. Yet they, the Germans, hire fanatics to ruin my name, to kill me, to stop me from doing what I am not doing. Is that irony?”
“It’s irony,” I agreed, getting worried about the boat that was about a hundred yards away and headed straight for us. “I don’t think that’s Don Winslow coming to our rescue.”
Einstein looked up at the oncoming boat but his mind was still on the bomb. “Perhaps such a bomb is not a good idea. I’ve considered that too. What if a reaction begins and can’t be stopped? Would the world be destroyed? Will the bullet that destroys the termite also bring down the house?”
“I’ve got a better one,” I said, pulling out my .38 and pointing it at the sailboat about thirty yards away. “Will the white-haired guy with the gun over there get us before I get him?”
With this, Einstein decided to look at the boat bearing down on us. No doubt about it. It was Povey. I could see his face, his grin. He didn’t look surprised to see me. He should have been. I liked even less his aiming that Walther at me.
“Get down, get low,” I shouted at Einstein, who went on puffing on his pipe and gave a sharp push to the rudder. I don’t know how I knew it was a rudder, but I did. My nautical vocabulary had doubled as my chances of survival were cut in half.
The two small boats were now headed straight at each other, which did several things. It made us a bigger target. It also brought us closer to Povey, who looked too damn comfortable steering that little boat with one hand and aiming at us with the other. Using the side of the boat to steady my hand, I aimed. The boat bobbed from side to side. I fired. Nothing. The bullet probably sailed past and plunked harmlessly into the water. Maybe it made it all the way to land and hit Carlisle the golfer in his fat ass. I almost laughed. A professional killer was within twenty yards of me and I was angry at a golfer. I had heard the game could get to you.
“Turn around. Get the hell out of here,” I shouted, as Einstein continued to steer right for the killer. Amused, Povey shouted something and laughed. I couldn’t tell what he shouted. The Walther came up, his arm straight, both eyes open the way they’re supposed to be. A breeze caught a loose strand on his bandaged hand and it fluttered like a small bird.
“Over the side,” I yelled at Einstein.
“No,” he said. He sounded excited but I didn’t have time to look back at him.
It looked like we were going to miss Povey by about five feet, come up right alongside him so he could pick us off. What movie was it where a yodeler saved …? Ah, Monsieur Verdoux. Charlie Chaplin’s about to crack Martha Raye’s head open with an oar when he spots a yodeler on the shore watching him. I didn’t think Povey would be bothered by a yodeler and I didn’t really expect a yodeler
in New Jersey. In Manhattan maybe, but not Jersey.
“Thank you,” said Povey, as we were almost even with him. I could see the Walther level on me, not because I was his primary target but because I had the gun. I shot wildly and saw a hole appear in the sail high above Povey’s head. He shook his head, showed teeth, and was about to shoot me when Einstein turned our little boat suddenly and we collided with Povey’s. Povey fell backward, his hand pushing the rudder. His boat did a sharp spin away from us and he turned to shoot over his shoulder. The bullet hit the wood about five inches from my face. I dropped my .38, got up, and jumped as Povey tried to steady his boat for another shot. I hit the small deck and stumbled forward into the flipping, flapping sail. Two shots, two holes through the sail, from Povey firing at me from the other side. I ducked low under the mast or whatever the hell the piece of wood was, rolled under it, and kicked out toward where I figured Povey had to be. Either he was there or I was dead. I was wrong on both counts. I missed him by a foot and his next shot went well over my head, probably because he couldn’t control the boat and kill me at the same time. He should have said the hell with the boat and concentrated on me, but I wasn’t going to give him advice. I kicked again. This time I struck hand and gun. I had been hoping for his groin but I settled for what I could get. The Walther plopped into the water, and Povey finally decided to let the wind take us where it would. He jumped forward, his right knee rising quickly into my stomach. My breath was gone, along with my will to fight. Povey stood up over me, reached into my pocket, and came out with a pocketknife. He calmly opened it while I silently grabbed for air. The blade was bigger than the one Errol Flynn used to put away Basil Rathbone in The Adventures of Robin Hood.
Povey said something in a language I didn’t understand and shifted the knife for a full-weighted lunge at my belly. He never made it. The thud and roll of the boat came together, as he went tripping over the side and I rolled helplessly to the edge of the boat, which almost turned over. As the boat righted itself, I could see Einstein contentedly watching the success of his second attack on an enemy vessel.
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