‘Bad?’
‘Yes.’
‘Very bad?’
‘Yes.’
‘OK.’ He frowned. ‘You’re German?’
‘Yes.’
‘You came from the submarine? Last night?’
‘Yes.’
‘You’re a lucky man.’
Stefan stared up at him.
‘You know about the submarine?’
‘Of course. Everyone knows about the submarine. Fishermen from the village tried to help. Everyone tried to help.’
‘And?’
Agustín studied him for a moment, then gave his hand a squeeze and shook his head.
‘I’m sorry,’ he said.
Stefan wanted to know more. He wanted to know who had survived, how they were, where he might find them, but Agustín had disappeared. He was back with the old man. Stefan tried to concentrate, tried to disentangle some clues from the torrent of Spanish from the kerbside. He thought he caught a name a couple of times – Eva? – but he couldn’t be sure. Then, without warning, the cart was on the move again.
The journey was brief this time. Was this a big village? Were they still on the coast? Was there a harbour? Access to the sea? Stefan searched in vain for answers. He thought he could hear seagulls but there was no sign of them overhead. Then the cart came to a halt. Another door. Another conversation. Three voices this time, all men.
Stefan tried to prop himself up on one elbow but failed completely. Then the cart swayed under the weight of one of the men. He was young, broad-shouldered. His face was nut-brown and he badly needed a shave but his grin was warm. Stefan looked at the hand thrust down towards him. It was huge.
‘Enrico,’ the man said.
Stefan shook the hand then shut his eyes as the man hauled him to his feet but the pain wasn’t as bad as he expected. Somehow, with Stefan folded over his shoulder, Enrico made it off the back of the cart. Another man was waiting at the roadside. Stefan put his arms around their shoulders, allowing them to take his weight. The door of the house in front of him was already open. Upstairs, in one of the windows, he caught the briefest glimpse of a woman’s face. She had a fall of jet-black hair. Her eyes met Stefan’s for no more than an instant, then she stepped away. There were flowers in a jam jar on the windowsill and white lace curtains, carefully gathered back with twists of scarlet ribbon.
‘Señor?’
It was the old man. He was still holding his hat. The other hand was extended, palm up, in a gesture of expectation.
Stefan stared at it a moment, not understanding. Then he remembered the coins. He nodded down at the pocket of his greatcoat. Help yourself. The old man needed no encouragement. His hand dug deep in the pocket and emerged with five gold coins. They shone in the bright sunshine. The old man was about to take the lot but Enrico stopped him. His voice was harsh.
‘Uno,’ he said. ‘Solamente uno.’
The old man began to protest but Enrico settled the argument by returning four of the coins to Stefan’s pocket. Stefan was still trying to read the expression on the old man’s face. It might have been disappointment at the trick fate had just played on him. It might have been anger. Either way, he didn’t know, didn’t care. He was alive. The old man had been well rewarded. And the nearness of the open door held the promise – however brief – of peace.
He did his best to thank the old man and then, remembering the face at the window, he looked up again but there was nothing but the flowers in the jar.
*
Mid-afternoon, after calling at the Project Office in East Palace Street, Gómez headed back from Santa Fe to the Hill. He rode the switchback stretches along the valley of the Rio Grande and then gunned the tan Army-issue Lincoln up the washboard zigzags that led to the mesa. On one of the tightest corners near the top of the climb, his windshield was suddenly full of a huge construction truck, the driver wrestling with the wheel, his hand on the horn. Gómez missed him by inches. Brake problems, he thought, as the truck swept past. The guy at the wheel was still fighting for control as the vehicle veered towards the drop-off and the desert floor below. This was a bony, naked landscape, unforgiving, and as the truck disappeared from his rear-view mirror Gómez pulled over to check the driver made it safely down.
The weather, unusually, was overcast and cool for September. The plume of dust dragged by the truck slowly diminished but in the stillness Gómez could still hear the gear box shredding cogs as the driver dropped the big engine down through the box before yet another hairpin bend. Finally he made it to the valley floor, a tiny speck crawling towards the distant frieze of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. These shadowless desert spaces had always reminded Gómez of the moon, except they were the colour of blood instead of the pewter colour of death, and he remained at the roadside for a moment or two, still shaken by the near miss with the truck.
The pace the Army set on the Hill was beyond reasonable. The scientists, many of them, were working fifteen-hour days and everyone else struggled to keep up. Corners cut. Meals missed. Brakes left unchecked. Anything to keep the program on schedule. Gómez shook his head. As a peacetime Marine, and later in the FBI, he’d eyeballed serious injury or worse on a number of occasions, but every time it happened he’d had that split second to scope the odds and emerge intact. That’s what training gave you. That was the way to survive. But the older, wiser guys knew better. The one that kills you, they always said, is the one you never expect, never anticipate, never even fucking see coming. The driver’s boot pumping the brake pedal. The smell of charring asbestos from the linings. The blare of the horn. And Gómez suddenly helpless in the face of certain death. Shit, he thought. What a place to die.
Half an hour later, safely back on the Hill, he found his new partner sitting at the desk they shared in the Admin Building that housed the security organisation. Carl Merricks was a small guy, fit, watchful, content to keep his own company. He was a decade younger than Gómez and his enemies, who were many, called him Jinx. Gómez didn’t care about the scuttlebutt. They’d worked a couple of jobs together and Merricks had never let him down. He was thorough, deeply private and immune to pressure from above. For the latter reason alone, Gómez deeply approved of the man.
A long list of names, some ticked, lay at his elbow. He’d spent part of the day interviewing Fiedler’s colleagues from the Tamper Group. When Gómez enquired about meaningful leads he shook his head. Fiedler, he said, had been well respected and popular. No one had a bad word to say about the man and no one had the first idea why he’d take his own life. He’d seemed so content, so pleased to be up on the Hill, so proud to be part of the Project.
‘You know how old the guy was?’ Merricks glanced up.
‘Thirty-eight,’ Gómez said. ‘Looked fifty, easy. Maybe older. Marta blames the hours the guy worked, and all the other pressures. Insane.’
Gómez wanted to know about alibis. Where had all these guys been when Fiedler died?
‘Across there in the Tech Area. I checked everyone out. They were all at work. Every single one.’
‘The guy had enemies?’
‘Not that anyone’s saying.’ Merricks’ eyes went down to the list again, then he shrugged and gestured at the phone. ‘The Bureau came through. Guy wants you to call back.’
‘Name?’
‘O’Flaherty.’
‘Did it sound urgent?’
‘Everything sounds urgent to these people. Where were they when God invented manners?’
Gómez smiled. It was true. Most of his ex-buddies had raised impatience to an art form. Talk fast. Never apologise. Just like Mr Hoover.
Gómez shed his jacket. He’d deal with O’Flaherty later.
‘So where exactly are we?’
Merricks tossed his pencil on to the stack of paperwork at his elbow and leaned back in the chair. He was up for the calisthenics session every morning at half six and Gómez knew he punished himself in the gym last thing most evenings. That way, you kept your body in reasonable work
ing order but even so the sheer grind of keeping the security lid on a frontier town like this – a teeming settlement that wasn’t even supposed to exist – was starting to show on his face. He looked older than his years. Not a compliment.
‘You want the good news?’
‘Try me.’
‘I got us another desk.’
‘Great, so where do we put it?’
‘I got us another office, too.’ He nodded at the door. ‘Just down the hall there. Twice the size.’
Gómez was impressed. Working space on the Hill was more precious than water. So how come Merricks had managed to pull off a miracle like this?
‘I asked nicely. Never underestimate the power of surprise.’
Gómez was still trying to work it out.
‘There’s a WAC called Jennifer in charge of this stuff,’ he said. ‘Answers to Whyte.’
‘You’re right.’
‘She’s ugly as hell.’
‘Right again.’ Merricks grinned. ‘On the outside.’
‘Meaning?’
‘We got the office.’
Gómez smiled. Merricks had a kill rate on the Hill that would have been the envy of any combat pilot. Women loved the fact that he wasn’t as loud and showy as many of the enlisted men, and they liked to believe that Jinx – with his sleepy eyes and his long silences – was a bit of a thinker. The latter assumption happened to be true. Another reason Gómez was happy to have him on the team.
‘What else?’ he asked.
Merricks reached for Sol Fiedler’s security file. The dead metallurgist, he said, had left Germany in December ’38. He and his wife had been living in Berlin for several years, with Fiedler working at the KWI.
‘KWI?’
‘Kaiser Wilhelm Institute. You’re supposed to know this stuff.’
‘Sure. Tell me more.’
Merricks returned to the file. According to Fiedler’s immigration records, both he and Marta had been disturbed by what the Nazis were up to with the Jews and one night in late November, when the hard men went to town on the synagogues and Jewish businesses, they decided to get out while they still could.
‘So where did they go?’
‘England. He ended up in a government lab in Manchester working way below his pay grade. Marta hated England. When it came to Jews she thought some of the Brits were as bad as the Nazis and so she began to hassle him for another move.’
‘Here?’
Merricks nodded. Fiedler’s reputation in the field of metallurgy had evidently gone before him – a sheaf of important papers published in leading scientific journals – and within weeks he and Marta plus a whole bunch of guys from the Tube Alloys group were on a boat to Canada.
‘Tube Alloys? You want me to explain?’
Gómez shook his head. Tube Alloys was the Brit code name for the atomic bomb programme. Even he knew that.
Merricks masked a smile. From Montreal, he said, the Fiedlers had gone down to Chicago where Sol got a job in something called the Metallurgical Laboratory run at the university by an Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi.
‘Fermi’s the guy who was figuring out ways to split the atom. Don’t ask me about the science but he built himself a big pile of graphite blocks under a squash court right there in Chicago. No one thought it would work but apparently Fiedler was a believer. Turned out Fermi was right. The thing went critical at the end of ’42 and a couple of years later here we are.’
‘With a bigger office.’
‘Sure. And if you want the truth a bunch of coupons helped.’
Gómez didn’t enquire further. Among the G-2 crowd, the guys from Army Intel, Jinx was also known as ‘Mr Coupon’. He always seemed to have an inexhaustible supply – for gas, for clothing, even for food – and they greased the wheels when he wanted a favour.
Gómez wanted to know exactly how long Fiedler had been up on the Hill. He thought he remembered the name from the early days but he couldn’t be sure.
‘You were here in the early days?’ Merricks looked surprised.
‘Two months after it opened. June ’43.’
‘I didn’t know that. What was it like?’
‘Mud and dust and not much to do except work,’ Gómez said. ‘There was an old school and a few buildings in the Tech Area but that was pretty much it. Think the Wild West. Think Tombstone without the laughs.’
‘You’re telling me it’s changed?’
‘Big time. Back then there was nothing. You slept in a dormitory with sixty men. You want to watch a movie? Little frame hall with wooden benches and a big old pot-belly stove outside for when your beer froze. You want to make a phone call? One line out – and that belonged to the Forest Service. They called it the most secret place on earth and that’s probably right. No one in his right mind would want to come anywhere near it.’
Gómez shook his head at the memory. Fifteen months later the Hill – though still top secret – was unrecognisable. Without doubt, the most secret place on earth. And probably the busiest.
Merricks was back with Fiedler’s file. The couple had been childless. Once the Corps of Engineers had got properly organised, they moved into the modest ground-floor duplex that became their home.
‘Where they stayed?’
‘Yep.’
‘Same neighbours?’
‘Pretty much. The couple upstairs moved out last week. I also talked to the people next door.’
‘And?’
‘Same story. Nice guy. Shy. Devoted to his wife. Eccentric around figures. Clever like they don’t make clever any more.’
Gómez didn’t understand. The Hill was bursting with mega-brains, guys who understood the dark magic of quantum physics and were working flat out to blow up half the world.
‘Fiedler was different. He went one step further. He had a party piece. Apparently saved him from too much conversation.’
‘Like how?’
‘Like he’d multiply two numbers – five-figure numbers – and do the math in his head. Moms loved it, especially the ones with older kids. They’d toss Fiedler the numbers and he’d calculate it right out, there and then, just using that big old brain of his, and come up with a result in no time at all. Took the kids hours to check if he was right. If they caught up with him he gave them candy bars. Made them savvy without ever knowing it. Education without tears.’
‘Any of these women ever fall for him?’
‘Not that anyone’s saying. He doesn’t seem to have been that kind of guy. Like I say, shy.’
‘How about her?’
‘Devoted. You can see it now. The rest of her life? She doesn’t want to know. By all accounts she loved the man to death.’
‘Interesting phrase,’ Gómez said.
Merricks glanced up and then returned to the file. ‘Fiedler made a couple of trips over the past year or so. Chicago one time. Caltech the other. Both on business. Took the train on both occasions. On the Chicago outing he was Saul Fernstein. In California he carried ID in the name of Sidney Freid.’
Gómez nodded. It was standard procedure for Los Alamos scientists to travel under false names, part of the blanket of mystifying security measures that had descended on the army of scientists living and working on the Hill. Most of these people were young and treated the code names and security drills as a joke but Fiedler, fresh from the darkness of the Third Reich, may have been different.
‘You’re telling me he was some kind of security risk?’
‘Hard to say. There’s nothing on his file. He was checked on entry to the States and checked again when he went into the program up in Chicago. Clean both times.’
‘Meaning what?’
Merricks shot Gómez a look, then shrugged. They both knew that Army security, when it came to deep background, was a joke. Mr Hoover knew it, too. He’d grabbed as much turf for the FBI as he could when it came to hunting down Commie spies and told anyone who cared to listen that the Army people had never got past first base.
‘Was Fiedl
er under surveillance on those trips?’ Gómez asked.
‘No. No one saw the need. According to his wife, when they were still in Berlin he gave money to the Republican fundraisers during the fighting in Spain but that just puts him alongside most of the other guys in the Tech Area. These people are bright. They also have a conscience. That doesn’t make Fiedler a spy.’
‘But he could have met someone? Is that what you’re saying?’
‘It’s possible.’ His eyes returned to the file. ‘He was four days in Chicago, a couple of days longer on the West Coast. All it takes is a single meeting. On the street. A package left in a bar. Whatever.’
‘So what would he have known? What would he have passed on?’
‘He worked in the Tamper Group. He was a metallurgist first, nuclear physicist second. That’s what took him to Chicago.’
‘So what would he have known?’
Merricks held his gaze. This was a difficult area. All information on the Hill – indeed, on the Project – was strictly rationed. You knew what you had to know. Not a jot more. Even the counter-intel people – folks like Gómez and Merricks – were hog-tied by the same rules. In theory.
‘So what would he have known?’ Gómez asked for the third time.
‘He was working on the design of the high-explosive lenses that surround the plutonium core on Fat Man.’
Gómez nodded. Fat Man was lab-speak for one of the bombs under construction. Allegedly there was another. Little Boy? He didn’t know. Either way, even these tiny nuggets of information were north of Top Secret.
‘Who told you?’
‘Guy I’ve gotten to know.’
‘You trust him? Believe him?’
‘Totally. We work out together. It’s a pain thing. After that we speak truth to each other. He’s the one with the stuff that matters. Me? I listen.’
Gómez rarely laughed but now was different. The moment he’d arrived on the Hill he’d sensed a deep divide, a yawning canyon, between the scientists and the military. The grown-ups were the guys in uniform. They were the ones who insisted on what they called compartmentalisation. Broadly that meant need-to-know. More than 120,000 were working on the Project nationwide and apparently less than a dozen knew anything approaching the whole story.
Finisterre Page 5
