Today, Gómez had phoned ahead. The doctor looked up from a huge pile of paperwork as Gómez tapped on his door. He had a big open smile. He was pleased to see him.
‘You OK?’
‘Never better.’
‘Glad to hear it.’ He gestured at the mess of paperwork. ‘We’ve got another virus on the reservation. I’m blaming the Commies.’ He opened a drawer and slid out what looked like a report. He checked the front page and then offered it to Gómez.
‘Is that the autopsy findings? On Sol Fiedler?’ Gómez didn’t move.
‘Sure. It’s a copy. I thought that’s what you wanted.’
‘I’ve got one already. No need.’
‘But this is about Sol Fiedler?’
‘It is.’
‘So what do you want to know?’ He glanced down at the report. ‘You think I did a crummy job? Is that it? Only I never went near the Medical Examiner course. Carving up dead bodies? Never appealed.’
‘You did a fine job. You did what you could. Guy got a bullet in his head. Point-blank range. Powder burns round the entry wound. No one walks away from that.’
‘So what, exactly, do you want to know?’
Gómez took his time. This was going to be tricky and he knew it.
‘You’ll know Arthur Whyte,’ he said slowly.
‘Sure. I guess he’s your boss.’
‘You’re right. He is. Did he attend the autopsy? His name’s not on the list.’
‘He didn’t.’
‘Has he spoken to you since?’
‘Yes. In fact he came here a couple of days back. Just like you. Said he happened to be passing by.’
‘And?’
‘There was something he wanted to clear up. Tell you the truth, I never understood why.’
‘He wanted to know something? Clarification?’
‘Sure. Something I didn’t include in the report.’
‘Like what?’
Jackson hesitated. He didn’t know where this was going. Finally he shrugged. He knew that Gómez was carrying the Fiedler file. What the hell.
‘He asked me whether Fiedler was circumcised. He knew he was Jewish, he knew all that. He just needed to be sure.’
‘And what did you say?’
‘I told him he was.’ He paused, bemused. ‘Is that what you were after? Is that all?’
Gómez was already on his feet. He could see Merricks through the window at the wheel of the Ford. He extended a hand.
‘That’s plenty,’ he said. ‘I need to catch a train.’
Part Two
8
It was an early autumn morning in Chicago. A blustery wind off the lake carried the first chill taste of the coming winter and an elderly caretaker in patched dungarees was doing his best to corral a heap of fallen leaves. Gómez watched him from his perch in the window of the diner across the street. O’Flaherty was late. He’d promised eleven o’clock. It was now twenty past.
He arrived minutes later, as voluble and unkempt as ever. At Hoover’s insistence, the Bureau’s G-men wore their hair short, their grey suits neatly pressed and their black shoes permanently buffed. Yet here was a guy who’d guarantee you crazy shirts, food stains and a wild tangle of greying hair that hadn’t seen a comb in weeks. Gómez happened to know he had the ear of J. Edgar, reporting directly to the big office in DC where he served as a facilitator in business the great man preferred to keep in the shadows, but even so there were limits. Hoover had been known to sack guys whose tie he didn’t like. So how come he cut this hobo so much slack?
O’Flaherty settled noisily on the stool next to Gómez. Not a word of apology for arriving late.
‘Well?’ he said. ‘Why the meet?’
‘I need a favour.’
‘You got one, didn’t you? We turned the slug around real quick. Got you the result you wanted. You want the weapon back? Is that it? Only we understood you Army people ain’t so keen on judicial process.’
The thought of Fiedler’s death leading to any form of trial lit a flicker of amusement in Gómez’s eyes.
‘You’ve been reading my reports?’
‘Sure. Me and a handful of others.’
‘Including the Boss?’
‘Sure. To the best of my knowledge.’
‘You still speak to him regularly?’
‘Nice try. If you guessed yes you’d guess right.’
‘So what does he think?’
‘Mr Hoover?’ O’Flaherty had half turned on the stool and was eyeing the display of pastries on the counter. Gómez remembered a wolfish appetite for anything sweet. ‘Mr Hoover thinks what he always thought. He’d love a slice of the action down there. He’s decided Groves is the main man just now and it pains Mr Hoover greatly that he can’t lay a finger on him. He tries but he fails. Groves is Mr Clean. It’s driving Mr Hoover nuts. He knows you guys are sitting on a big fat egg. That big fat egg is all our futures, which I guess gives the good general something of a monopoly. Groves has the ear of the President. Not a situation Mr Hoover is prepared to tolerate. Army security is shit. We hear it from all quarters, including you, buddy. In which regard Mr Hoover says thank you.’
‘No problem. I thought we had a deal.’
‘Sure do. Is that what this is about? You’ve come to renegotiate? Only that might be difficult. Mr Hoover appreciates the work you’re doing down there. You keep us close to the action. It’s one thing to suspect the place is crawling with fucking Commies, quite another to have it confirmed.’
‘So what happens to the names I give you?’
‘We put them through the wringer. Full service. Root canal stuff. We dig deep. Every goddam particle we can find on the guys. Then I guess the files go to Groves. But always via the President.’
‘Hand-delivered?’
‘Sure.’
‘By the man himself?’
‘Who else? Knowledge is power, buddy. Always has been, always will be. Even your Mr Oppenheimer accepts that. Assuming he doesn’t blow us all up.’
Gómez nodded. O’Flaherty had abandoned the conversation and was piling pastries on to a plate at the counter. Gómez watched him emptying his pockets, looking for change. These last fifteen months, on maybe half a dozen occasions, Gómez had been quietly meeting with a retired agent who’d once run the Bureau field office in Albuquerque. The guy lived way out in the suburbs – wife dead, big dog called Clancy. The meets happened at a series of locations downtown, fleeting exchanges in case of Army surveillance. The material Gómez passed along had nothing to do with the Gadget but everything to do with some of the scientists who were going to make the thing work.
It was Gómez’s belief that these guys – maybe a handful, maybe more – were seriously flaky. Secrets were leaking to the Soviets but such were the pressures on the program that nobody was paying the right kind of attention. One day, in his view, he’d open the paper to find New York or DC a pile of ashes and he didn’t want that to happen. Intel about intel, he thought. The spycatcher turned spy. Not the least of the ironies that stitched through his life.
O’Flaherty was back on his stool, licking sugar from his fingertips. He was never less than blunt.
‘You’ve come a hell of a way,’ he said. ‘For what?’
‘Another favour.’
‘Name it.’
Gómez slipped an envelope out of his jacket. Gave it to O’Flaherty.
‘The guy’s name is Frank Donovan,’ he said. ‘He’s a contractor onsite at Los Alamos. All the details on our file are in there.’
‘So what else do you need?’
‘Whatever you can give me. Guy claims he was in the Navy. That might not be true.’
‘And you can’t find out for yourself? You’re telling me the Navy doesn’t keep records? Isn’t that why Groves built the fucking Pentagon?’
‘The Navy people are pissed with Groves. He keeps them out of the loop exactly the same way he deals with everyone else. Like I say …’ Gómez nodded down at the envelope, ‘… anyt
hing you’ve got.’
O’Flaherty had a mouth full of pastry. Then he wanted to know more about Donovan.
‘Why’s he so hot, this guy? You wanna give me a clue?’
Gómez shook his head. Private business, he said.
‘And that’s all? Two days on a train for that?’
‘No.’
‘You mean there’s more?’
‘Yeah.’ Gómez nodded at the envelope. ‘There’s an address in there, the place Donovan has been living. He left in a hurry a couple of days back. I want it sealed off. I want your guys down there to go through it.’
‘What are they looking for?’
‘Paperwork, mainly. Bank statements. Letters. Plus any kind of lead on where he might have gone. There’s a woman he lives with, too. Name of Francisca. Plus three kids. If they’ve all lit out he’ll need a different vehicle. The guy’s been driving a red Ford pick-up. He may have part-exed it. I need the details of whatever he’s driving now.’ He paused. ‘You wanna write this down?’
‘No.’ O’Flaherty tapped his head. ‘It’s in here.’
‘You’re sure?’
‘Yeah. Anything else we can help you with?’
Gómez asked O’Flaherty about the Immigration people. Were the channels still open?
‘You mean frontier control?’
‘Yes.’
‘Anywhere particular in mind, amigo?’
‘Guess.’
‘All of them?’ O’Flaherty couldn’t believe it. There were dozens of crossing points into Mexico.
‘Start with the closest. If the guy’s heading south in a hurry, I’m thinking El Paso or maybe Route 11 down to Columbus. Either way he thinks he’s gonna end up safe.’
‘From what?’
‘From us.’
‘You gonna tell me why?’
For a moment Gómez toyed with sharing his suspicions about Donovan but then shook his head. Compartmentalisation, he thought. Need to know. If he was still carrying a Bureau badge, enquiries like these would come with the turf. As it was, working for Army Intel, he had no jurisdiction off-base. Hence the shopping list for O’Flaherty.
O’Flaherty wanted to know about Gómez’s new bosses.
‘They know you’re here? Those dumb fuckers paying your wages?’
‘They know I’ve got furlough.’
‘And that’s it? That’s all I get?’
‘Yeah. For now.’
O’Flaherty seemed to take the news personally. A couple of years back, the news that Army G-2 were quietly recruiting personnel with investigative experience for the Manhattan Project sites across the country had reached the ears of Mr Hoover. He and O’Flaherty had combed the ranks of front-line Bureau agents for likely applicants and one of them had been Gómez. He’d taken some notable scalps, chiefly in Chicago. His service record was second to none. His years in the Marine Corps would do him no harm in front of a Pentagon selection board. And so it had happened. Lieutenant Hector Gómez. En route to PO Box 1663, Santa Fe. Mr Hoover’s canary in the Army’s coal mine. Pulling not one salary but two.
O’Flaherty had always been Gómez’s point of contact within the Bureau itself. Until recently, O’Flaherty had worked out of a small apartment that served as an office in DC, with Mr Hoover barely a couple of blocks away. In all truth, Gómez never even knew whether O’Flaherty was the guy’s real name. Since the war started, even crime and justice had become a world of smoke and mirrors, nothing reflecting its true image.
Now Gómez wanted to know about Chicago.
‘You’re here for keeps?’ he asked O’Flaherty.
‘I doubt it. We’ve still got some problems in the munitions business. I thought my days running informants were over. How wrong can a man be?’
Gómez reached for his coffee. His own days in Detroit had taught him a great deal about how easy it was to disrupt the assembly lines.
‘You still report to Mr H?’
‘I do. And I’ve still got the place on M Street. This war will be over soon. Then I’m back in DC full time.’
Mention of DC brought Gómez’s head up.
‘One thing I forgot to mention. I need the stuff from Donovan’s place shipped out. There’s no way I can deal with it on the Hill.’
‘Care to tell me where you’d like us to deliver?’
‘DC.’
He wrote down the address of Agard Beaman’s apartment. O’Flaherty barely spared it a glance. He’d yet to pick up the envelope.
‘What if we say no to all this?’ he said.
‘Are you serious?’
‘Yeah.’
‘Then you find someone else to snitch on what’s really going on down there. You wanna do that? Has Mr Hoover got another source at Los Alamos? Only now’s the time to tell me.’
O’Flaherty didn’t answer. Finally he picked up the envelope, slipped it into his pocket and then, with the ghost of a smile, he was gone.
*
Autumn came quickly to the bare, rock-strewn fields of Galicia. The harvest, such as it was, had been gathered weeks before, hand-cut fodder to keep the animals alive until spring, wooden carts piled high with potatoes and beets. The fishermen still put to sea from tiny harbours along the coast but always with one eye cocked at the sky. At this time of year, straddling the equinox, storm after storm swept in from the vastness of the Atlantic. One had already devoured a U-boat and its crew. No sane man would risk his life or his living in the face of such merciless violence.
Stefan, still bedbound, was getting better by the day. Eva paid him regular visits, bringing bowls of hot soup and rich golden tortillas spiced with chunks of chorizo sausage. During the afternoons, especially when the weather was fine and the room was striped with bars of sunlight, she’d linger at his bedside, making a space for herself among the tumble of blankets. After the thin-lipped silence of his first days in the house, she seemed to have come alive. Agustín had been right. She wasn’t a peasant girl at all. Far from it.
One afternoon, Stefan asked her about the photography. By now, with some difficulty, he could make his way out of the room and limp carefully along the narrow corridor to the lavatory at the end. On one of these journeys he’d noticed the sharp tang of chemicals hanging in the air and when he’d enquired further, she’d confirmed that she had a darkroom downstairs where she developed her films.
The darkroom, Eva explained, had originally belonged to her father, Tomaso. He’d learned his photography skills at university in Oviedo and when he’d returned to teach at the local school he’d devoted his spare time to capturing moments of village life that would otherwise have gone unrecorded. Eva had scrapbooks of these photos and shared them with Stefan: an elderly peasant couple posing shyly in front of an old stone granary, set on pillars to keep the rats out; a gypsy violinist framed by a whirl of dancers at a street fiesta; a dog perched on a dry-stone wall, a loop of scallop shells hanging from its neck.
Stefan had been intrigued by the shells.
‘It’s a pilgrim dog,’ Eva told him. ‘Every year it walked with its master to Santiago de Compostela. My father said it lived to be twenty-seven years old. Everyone thought it was a miracle.’
Her father, she said, had taught her everything she knew about photography. She’d been a rebel at school but she loved languages. She’d learned first French and then English. She liked English a lot. It sat happily in her mouth. She liked the fact that it wasn’t her native tongue. She liked the feeling that it turned her into somebody else. To speak another language, she said, you need to take off your old clothes and become a stranger to yourself. It was an arresting image, something that Stefan had never quite encountered before, not put this way, and he wanted to know more. Had she been bored with village life? Did she need to get away?
‘Sí.’
Her father had given her an old camera for her twenty-first birthday. It was a good camera, a Leica, German. By now she’d become aware of the wider world beyond the village. She sensed that the country wasn’t at
ease with itself, that another Spain was stirring beyond the iron grip of Church and family. Then, the following year, the coal miners had gone on strike along the coast in neighbouring Asturias. She wanted to go there with her camera. She wanted to find out what was happening. Her father still had friends in Oviedo. She stayed with a family who lived in an apartment behind the railway station. The apartment was on the fourth floor. She described the day the striking miners arrived. They fought the government troops from the barracks along the road and then occupied the city. She’d watched the whole thing from the tiny balcony of the apartment. She said she’d never felt so alive.
‘Alive?’
‘Sí.’
‘You mean excited?’
‘No, I mean …’ She touched the swell of her left breast. ‘I loved these men. I loved what they were doing. They were fighting the Fascists. For me that was good.’
The government, she said, sent troops to punish the miners. Many of them came from Africa, from Spanish Morocco. They were organised by a general called Franco. They killed thousands of miners. They raped and looted and put men against the wall and shot them.
‘You took photographs of all this?’
‘Afterwards, yes. They left the bodies where they fell. They left the women, too. I took many pictures. Many. I gave them to the newspaper, to anyone who wanted to look, but then I realised that was what the Fascists wanted. They wanted everyone to see what they could do. They wanted everyone to know that they had the power. And so …’ she shrugged, ‘… I stopped taking pictures.’
‘And came home?’
‘Sí. For nearly two years. I worked in the school like my father. I took pictures of weddings and children and saints’ days, just like him.’
‘And then?’
‘And then the war came. And so I left.’
‘Where did you go?’
‘Barcelona.’
Stefan tried to push her further, tried to find out what lay at the end of this long journey east. He’d met Germans, mainly pilots, who’d fought with the Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War. They’d flown the new Me109s and they boasted about strafing the Republican trenches. They’d mocked the tiny stick figures trying to shoot them down with old rifles and they’d come back to the Fatherland knowing that command of the skies would beat any earthbound army. Stefan had known one of them from school in Hamburg. Dieter Merz had been four years older, something of a hero figure. He’d said that combat flying sometimes felt the same as playing God.
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