Finisterre

by Graham Hurley

  Scientific genius, as Gómez was beginning to understand, marched in lockstep with acute instabilities on the emotional side. A lot of these guys were like kids: vulnerable, easily upset, ticking bombs when it came to getting on with each other. A difference of opinion about some technical detail? Resentment about lab status or data access? A quarrel over a woman? Some tribal difference buried deep in a shared European past? The pressures up on the Hill were brutal and Gómez had no problem imagining circumstances that might have led to the shooting. Engaged in a race to blow up half the world, the death of a fortysomething nuclear physicist would have the lightness of a feather, and pretty much everyone knew it. Bang. Gone. Dead. Was that the way it had been? A moment of extreme violence to make some guy with a grudge against Sol Fiedler feel better about himself?

  Gómez contemplated the proposition, knowing it was unlikely. Unless Sol Fiedler had been a stranger to his wife, unless he’d really taken his own life, then this thing had been planned by someone else. Poorly thought-out but planned nonetheless. Gómez knew from Marta Fiedler that Tuesdays, after her visit to the PX, she always went over to the school to help with the kids. That was her routine. It never varied. Except that this morning she’d not felt great and hadn’t wanted to spread her germs around. Plus Sol, too, was feeling lousy. Hence his early return from the Tech Area, sent home by a supervisor anxious to avoid the bug spreading to any other of his precious scientists.

  So who else might have known about Sol’s presence back in the house? A rich opportunity if you wanted to kill the man and dress it up as some kind of suicide? Gómez pulled his notepad towards him, flipped to a new page and made a list of the obvious suspects. Working colleagues in the Tech Area. Close friends he might have seen over the weekend. Folks, in short, who knew he had a bug that would likely bring him back home. Alone.

  Each of these people would have to account for their movements this morning. They’d need an alibi, corroboration, a cast-iron reason for Gómez to strike their names from the list. Only this way could he start to tease investigative sense into Fiedler’s death. He leaned back, the beginnings of a smile ghosting across his face as he imagined the news bursting out of Fiedler’s metallurgy lab and spreading like a prairie fire across the Tech Area: not only had the guy died but there appeared to be grounds to believe that someone had killed him. No wonder Arthur Whyte wanted Sol Fiedler put quietly to rest, a suicide accepted at face value. What was a single death in the fortunes of the nation, in the balance of history, when these people were scheming to incinerate millions?

  Gómez checked his watch. Marta Fiedler had already moved out of the apartment to stay with friends. Tomorrow, once he’d taken a look at Sol’s personal file, he’d make time for a much longer interview. Merricks, meanwhile, had sealed off the apartment and would be supervising the forensics. The body, already photographed, had been removed to the hospital morgue. The autopsy would be handled by a suitably qualified doctor on site. The phrase had been Arthur Whyte’s. ‘Suitably qualified’ didn’t begin to measure up to Gómez’s evidential standards but for once he had to accept that access to Los Alamos was heavily restricted. No way was news of Fiedler’s death going to leak further than strictly necessary. At least not for now.

  Gómez was at the door when his phone began to ring. It was a voice he recognised at once. Agard Beaman. The rookie campaigner he’d looked after a couple of years back in Detroit. The guy who’d nearly taken a bullet from a hit man after upsetting the wrong people during the mid-term elections.

  Gómez didn’t bother with the normal courtesies. He didn’t have to. Beaman was in a state of some excitement. Gómez could hear it in his voice.

  ‘I’m in Santa Fe tomorrow,’ he said. ‘Tell me you’re not busy.’

  Gómez was staring down at his notepad. The to-do list, mostly minor stuff, filled three pages.

  ‘I’m not busy,’ he said. ‘Tell me where and when.’

  *

  It took longer than Stefan expected to get the crew out of the stricken submarine. One by one, in the gloom of the emergency lighting, they fought their way towards the conning tower, scaled the ladder on the heels of the SS men and disappeared into the roaring darkness above. The Oberleutnant and a couple of sailors had done their best to break out the emergency rubber dinghies from their compartment on the heaving deck but they’d both been washed away. Each of the crewmen knew that their only hope lay in jumping overboard and hoping to God they caught the lucky wave that would lift them shorewards, avoiding the rocks that exploded around them, huge gouts of wind-torn spray, white against the blackness of the night.

  Speared on the jagged rocks, U-2553 was already breaking up, her buoyancy tanks ruptured, her bow a tangle of iron plates, the remains of her hull shuddering under the impact of the waves. Alone in the control room with the SS Brigadeführer Stefan was only too aware his time was limited. He’d counted his men out and he knew he had at best minutes to make it up the ladder before the storm laid the boat on its side and beat it to death.

  Huber was conscious again. Water was flooding into the hull, already knee-deep, slopping from compartment to compartment. Stefan had helped the SS officer to his feet and now he was clinging to one of the big stanchions, his face pale, blood still trickling from the gash in his scalp. Stefan told him that the rest of his men had left the submarine but he didn’t seem to understand. I don’t want to drown, he kept saying. You have to help me.

  Stefan knew that getting Huber’s body up to the conning tower would probably kill them both, and he could see in his eyes that he understood this. The end had come. But, please God, not by drowning.

  Stefan still had the wallet and the Luger. He’d slipped the wallet into a pocket of his long grey leather coat but he’d kept the gun in his hand.

  Huber was looking at it. Then he whispered something Stefan didn’t at first catch.

  Stefan bent low, asked him to repeat it.

  ‘Shoot me.’ He nodded at the gun. ‘That’s an order.’

  Stefan stared at him. Since the U-boat war began, he must have killed hundreds of people. But not like this. So close. So intimate. So personal.

  ‘No,’ he shook his head. ‘I can’t. I won’t.’

  ‘Please.’

  ‘No. I said no.’

  ‘Then let me do it.’

  The gun again. Huber couldn’t take his eyes off it. Death by execution, Stefan thought. The fanatic’s best friend. Live by the bullet, die by the bullet.

  ‘You want me to give you the gun?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘So you kill me, too?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’re crazy. Why should I believe you?’

  ‘You needn’t. Just shoot me. Just kill me. It’s a small thing. Just do it.’

  A small thing? Another huge wave lifted the boat. When it settled again, the hull buckling against the rocks, the list to starboard was more acute. Fighting gravity, Stefan could barely stand up. The water was rising fast and he could feel the iciness spreading up beyond his knees. Now or never, he thought. Him or me.

  Huber hadn’t taken his eyes off Stefan’s face. Then a hand went to the pocket of his greatcoat and he produced a fistful of coins. Even in the dimness of the hull, they glittered.

  ‘Polish gold.’ He thrust the coins towards Stefan. ‘They’re yours. Here. Take them.’

  Stefan didn’t move. Loot, he thought.

  ‘I said take them.’

  Stefan shook his head. He wanted nothing to do with this man’s booty, with this man’s war.

  Huber stepped closer. His breath clouded on the cold air.

  ‘Yes? You’ll do it?’ He nodded down at the gun.

  Stefan was looking up at the conning tower. For the first time, he realised the obvious.

  ‘You can’t swim?’

  ‘No.’

  Stefan nodded, at last beginning to understand. Huber’s hand was reaching for Stefan’s coat. Even now, even here, he needed to be obeyed. Over the roar of
the storm, Stefan caught the jingle of coins as the gold settled in his pocket.

  ‘OK, then.’ Stefan shrugged, took a tiny step away, and then cocked the Luger. ‘It’s your choice.’

  The Brigadeführer’s eyes should have been shut. In movies they’d have been shut. In books they’d have been shut. But they weren’t. Huber was staring at Stefan, daring him, taunting him, shaming him into pulling the trigger. Even now, a breath away from oblivion, he’d maintained the pecking order. The SS were the true believers. The Schutzstaffel were still on top of the pile, surveying the wreckage of the Thousand Year Reich. Treu. Tapfer. Gehorsam. Loyal. Valiant. Obedient.

  ‘Heil Hitler,’ Huber said softly. ‘Prove yourself a man.’

  2

  Santa Fe had two decent hotels. The crowd from the Hill met, drank, gossiped and occasionally stayed over at La Fonda. Visiting businessmen, physicists and commissioned officers above a certain rank favoured the Rancho Encantado. Gómez found Agard Beaman at La Luna. It was in the wrong part of town. The building had once served as an abattoir. Thirty rooms were shoehorned into two storeys. The air-con was little more than a promise. You’d be wise to avoid what passed as the restaurant. But it was cheap.

  Beaman occupied a room on the second floor. When Gómez arrived, pulling his Lincoln into the dusty parking lot across the street, Beaman was hanging out of his open window, yelling at a couple of Indian kids in the street below. The moment he saw Gómez, he broke off the exchange.

  ‘Come up, man,’ he said. ‘Room 207.’

  Gómez crossed the street. The kids were young, no more than ten, both boys. One of them was swinging a tattered length of rope. The other glanced up at the open window then rolled his eyes and drilled his forefinger into his temple. The gringo? Nuts.

  Beaman was sprawled on the bed when Gómez pushed at the door and stepped in. This was an imp of a man, barely five six, still young. Fiercely intelligent, he had limitless energy and a voice that came from a much bigger body. He was wearing patched shorts and a bleached white T-shirt in the late-summer heat.

  The room was tiny and smelled bad. Beaman’s bag lay open on the floor, books and clothes spilling on to the carpet. The carpet was as cheap as everything else, cratered with cigarette burns.

  ‘What’s with the kids?’ Gómez nodded towards the window.

  ‘They had a dog. A mutt. They had it on some kind of leash. That age you get bored. But there are limits, comprende?’

  Comprende was new. Gómez had spent the best part of three weeks with Beaman in Detroit during the mid-terms back in ’42, hired by the Democrats to protect their fiery young campaigner, but he’d never talked like this before. He used the word playfully but with a certain authority. Something’s happened, Gómez thought. The boy seems to have grown up.

  Gómez eyed the single chair, doubting it would take his weight. Beaman made space on the bed. Gómez shook his head.

  ‘There’s a bar on the next block,’ he said. ‘You need to get out of this shithole.’

  The bar was called El Aero. It was clean and way off the main drag. Gómez used it most times he came into town. He liked the owner, a wizened old guy called Artie who’d once flown stunt planes at Kansas country fairs, and he appreciated the fact that no one he knew would ever set foot in the place. Privacy mattered to Gómez and Artie had the age and the tact to understand that.

  The two men exchanged handshakes. Artie brought two beers to a table in the corner. Beaman liked the place on sight.

  ‘They do food here?’

  ‘Sure. Mainly Mexican. You hungry?’

  Beaman ordered a plate of enchiladas. Since Detroit, Gómez thought, the guy’s got even thinner.

  ‘Good to see you.’ He reached for his beer. ‘So tell me …’

  ‘Tell you what?’

  ‘Everything.’

  Beaman looked blank for a moment and then grinned. The grin was as boyish as ever, totally without guile, and Gómez was suddenly back in the sweaty half-darkness of the Detroit community hall as the elections came to the boil, watching Beaman on the tiny stage out front. The boy’s sympathies were with the Congressional District’s black population and they’d been there in their hundreds to listen. Agard Beaman had the gift of tongues, the talents of a preacher and memories of the way he’d played his audience that night had never left Gómez. Having beliefs so powerfully held was one thing. Gómez liked that, appreciated it. But being able to share those views, being able to bring four hundred people to their feet with a single gesture of that flappy little hand, was quite another.

  ‘Your guy win? Up there in Detroit?’

  ‘Yeah. It was close, closer than we ever expected, but we made it. Just. Fifteen hundred votes.’

  ‘Important, then.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The black vote. All those women.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘And I expect the candidate was truly grateful.’

  ‘Me, too,’ Beaman said. ‘You saved my fucking life that night. Which I guess is kinda the point. I want to say thank you.’

  Gómez held his gaze, watching the thin hand crab across the table towards his. Two guys on a motorbike had ambushed them as they drove away from the meeting. In the gunfight that followed, Gómez had shot them both to death.

  ‘No problem,’ he said. ‘It’s what I do.’

  ‘Kill people?’

  ‘Defend democracy. That’s a joke, by the way. They’d have shot me, too.’

  ‘You think so?’

  ‘I know so. The Bureau ran checks afterwards. They were both crims, hit men, decent records, knew what they were doing. They ran with a local mobster. The issue was the money, who exactly was paying for the hit, and we never got to the bottom of that. I’d have phoned and explained it all but you were gone.’

  ‘You, too. You just disappeared. I never understood that.’

  ‘The Agency stood me down. By the next day I was on a train to Chicago. They had a guy in the morgue and not too many witnesses and they needed to wrap the whole thing up. I got a month’s paid furlough. Plus there was no paperwork. I wasn’t complaining.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Now is different.’

  ‘How?’

  Gómez studied him for a long moment, then shook his head. Beaman’s hand had settled softly on his. Gómez, with some gentleness, removed it.

  ‘Thank you is all I ever need,’ he said. ‘Tell me what happened afterwards.’

  Beaman was still looking at Gómez’s hand. Then he permitted himself a tiny frown of disappointment and shrugged. Life, he said, had been more than kind to him. The Democratic Congressman for Detroit’s 13th District, safely back in the House, had spread the word about his efforts. Here was a young white activist who had won the trust – and the votes – of an ever-swelling black population. He had stamina and guts and a preparedness to go anywhere in the Union to continue the fight. The latter had caught the attention of a left-wing group in Washington with access to funding. The social revolution sparked by the war effort was flooding across the country, not least because the arsenal of democracy needed all the labour – black, white – it could lay its hands on.

  Gómez nodded. A couple of years back, a leading black activist had organised a Negro March on Washington to demand equal opportunities in the workplace. Gómez had been part of an FBI operation to run checks on some of the campaigners’ associates.

  ‘Hoover assumed they were all Commies,’ Gómez said. ‘Turned out he was wrong though the Boss never wanted to believe it.’

  ‘You’ve met Hoover? You know him?’ J. Edgar Hoover was Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

  ‘Once. I’d just come out of the Marines. It happened Hoover loved Marines which I guess was just as well because he sure didn’t love Hispanics like me. Or blacks. Or women.’

  ‘So what’s he like?’

  ‘Tiny guy. Wears lift heels. Keeps strange company.’

  Beaman laughed. In the end the march on Washing
ton had never happened but the threat alone had pressured President Roosevelt into conceding equal opportunities legislation.

  Artie had appeared and Beaman was making space on the table for an enormous plate of enchiladas. Gómez wanted to know whether he’d been involved in planning for the march.

  ‘Somewhat.’ Beaman was gazing at the enchiladas. ‘If you want anything to change in this country you have to go to Washington. You have to get to know people. Then you can state your case. I guess if you’re lucky you make an impression.’

  ‘And you?’

  ‘I made an impression.’

  Artie returned to the table with a bottle of chilli sauce and a jug of iced water. Beaman made a start on the wraps of glistening chicken. He ate slowly, pausing between mouthfuls to edge the story forward. A couple of months after the congressional elections he’d been sent south. The battle for workplace rights was – in theory at least – over but blacks in the military faced all kinds of discrimination.

  He mentioned an Army airfield. Carlsbad.

  ‘That’s New Mexico.’ Gómez recognised the name. ‘That’s near here. Less than two hours.’

  ‘You’re right. Jim Crow country. This stuff is beyond belief. We’re fighting a war. Men are dying. Blood is blood. You need every man you can find. You need to train him, motivate him, point him in the right direction. You ever heard of the 349th Aviation Squadron?’

  ‘Never.’

  ‘Here’s a bunch of black guys, loyal Americans. There are lots of them. They’re keen, they’re brave, they can’t wait to get into combat. But you know where the real war happens? Right there on the base. Take the theatre. A thousand seats. Maybe more than that. You know how many are reserved for our negro friends? Twenty. In the last row. At the very back. Same deal on the buses into town. You sit where you’re told to sit while the whiteys enjoy the view.’ He paused a moment, forking at the enchilada, then looked up again. ‘You’re black and hungry out there on the base? Forget it. No way are you allowed to eat in the canteen.’