O’Flaherty was off the phone. When Gómez grunted an apology for being late he waved it away.
‘You smell like a bar.’ He waved his hand in front of his mouth. ‘Ellis has gone to make coffee. Let’s hope it makes a difference.’
‘Who’s Ellis?’
‘Typewriting expert. Best we’ve got. Spent last night trying to match the envelope with the suicide note you gave me.’
‘And?’
‘He’ll tell you. Meantime, I’ve been taking a little advice.’
‘Who from?’
‘Mother Tolson. The Boss is out of town. Tolson’s in constant touch. Not perfect but next best.’
Gómez nodded. Clyde Tolson was Hoover’s eyes and ears. Thanks to Hoover, he sat one level down in the Bureau’s pecking order after a ballistic rise through the ranks. When they were both in DC, the two men ate lunch and dinner together, always the same restaurants, always the same tables. Rumour was the relationship went a great deal further but no one had yet produced the evidence.
‘So what does Tolson say?’
‘He thinks what we think.’
‘And what do we think?’
‘You kidding me? Fiedler has to have been a spy. Has to. Which means he was in deep with our Soviet friends.’ O’Flaherty paused. ‘I’m getting the impression Donovan has been around Los Alamos a while. Am I right?’
‘Fifteen months. Since June last year.’
‘And he buddied up with Fiedler? This relationship’s been going on a while?’
‘Yeah.’
‘And I’m guessing the guy had a free pass out when he was done?’
‘Yep. Every Tuesday. They never searched him. Happy not to.’
‘Slam dunk, buddy. He can take whatever he chooses. Piles of the stuff. Wells Fargo. Every Tuesday. On the button.’
‘You think so?’
‘I do.’ O’Flaherty crushed one cigarette and reached for another. ‘So we have ourselves both motive and opportunity. Now we need to understand just how bad the damage could be.’
‘Motive?’ Gómez needed O’Flaherty to slow down a little.
‘Sure. Plain as day. The guy’s a Commie. Most of these Jewboy scientists are. They buy themselves out of Austria or Germany or wherever the hell they’ve been living and one of the things they bring with them is a bunch of screwball fantasies about socialism. These guys are born to the faith. It comes with their mothers’ milk. One day, if you ever get the chance, ask Mr Hoover about Oppenheimer. Then stand well clear.’
‘Another Commie?’
‘Bet your sweet ass. And this is the guy in charge, am I right?’
Gómez nodded, said nothing. In truth he’d heard the rumour about Oppie from a thousand quarters but no one had ever come up with a shred of evidence that reading Marx and supporting the Reds in Spain meant you handed secrets to the Russians.
‘Fiedler couldn’t stand the Commies,’ Gómez said. ‘Everyone knew that.’
‘Cover story. All these guys sing from the same fucking song sheet.’ O’Flaherty waved a dismissive hand. Smoke curled in the air. ‘So let’s get down to the basics. What did the guy actually know?’
It was a question Gómez had often asked himself, about Fiedler most recently, but about one or two others as well. In theory, General Groves had locked individual scientists in discrete little compartments, restricting their view of the big picture, but science simply didn’t progress that way, especially if you had to hit deadlines as tough as these.
‘They talk a lot, people like Fiedler, people from the Tech Area. They meet every week. They compare notes. There are four divisions. Fiedler was a metallurgist.’
‘Meaning?’
‘He was working on one of the two bombs. You gotta think an orange in the middle. The orange is made of plutonium. This stuff makes a very big bang if you surround it with HE and get the trigger explosion just right. We’re talking millionths of a second. And we’re talking explosive lenses.’
‘You know this stuff for sure?’
‘I’m telling you what someone told me. Fiedler was in the Tamper Group. He was working on the lenses. Does that mean he knew a whole lot of other stuff about the plutonium itself? How it’s made? How pure it has to be? I dunno. You need a proper scientist to tell you that but one thing I do know and that’s this. These guys are making history and they know it. They call it the Dragon Experiment. The Dragon is the bomb, the Gadget. They’re tickling the tail of the Dragon, seeing just how far they can go before the Dragon gets mad and blows us all up. They make it sound like a game, and I guess in a way that’s what it is, but my point is this: if you’re Fiedler you get to know a whole lot of stuff outside of the Metallurgy Lab without even being properly aware of it. Does that make sense?’
For Gómez, this had the makings of a speech. The effort of getting the right words in the right order had cleared his mind but he was still glad to see the coffee arrive.
O’Flaherty didn’t bother with introductions. He wanted the answer to another question. Let’s suppose Fiedler has been shipping secrets out of Los Alamos by the truckful. Let’s agree that the Russians are clever enough to pick the stuff up. Let’s get ourselves truly frightened and assume Fiedler has blown the whole damn project sky high. Why kill him?
Gómez admitted he didn’t know, couldn’t work it out. Unless Groves and Oppenheimer and Arthur Whyte were right. That Sol Fiedler really did shoot himself.
‘Out of guilt?’ O’Flaherty was pouring the coffee.
‘Sure.’ Gómez shrugged. ‘Or despair.’
‘He borrowed the gun you sent for analysis?’
‘Yep.’
‘From Donovan?’
‘Yep. Donovan admitted it.’
‘And then Fiedler blew his brains out?’
‘Yep. And left a note. But the note’s wrong. He never called his wife “Liebling”. He called her “Spatzling”. It means “little sparrow”. These little details are important. According to Mr Hoover.’
O’Flaherty didn’t acknowledge the joke. He wanted to pass on a little more intelligence.
‘About?’
‘Donovan. Was the guy ever in the Navy like he told you? No way. He never even passed the basic medic exam. Club foot from birth. The guy never wore a uniform in his life. Did he have a crime sheet? No. But word on the street has him running stolen autos up from Mexico after Pearl Harbor. That’s when he wasn’t shooting coyotes. The auto scam was never properly investigated. Nothing ever went to court. But we’re looking at a dreamer here, a congenital liar, and I guess a man with a wife and three kids and no money in his pocket.’
‘So he was in and out of Mexico?’
‘Yep. Plus he had a Mexican wife.’
‘I met her. Somewhat of a looker.’ Gómez frowned. ‘Exactly where in Mexico did these cars come from?’
‘Where you’d expect. Ciudad Juarez. Right down the road there. Ellis? You wanna explain a coupla things to Mr Gómez here?’
Ellis had a briefcase. He took out a file and opened it, spreading the contents on the floor. Gómez recognised the typed letter from Fiedler he’d handed to O’Flaherty the previous day. Also the envelope with the Mexican stamp recovered from Donovan’s house. Beside the envelope were a series of blow-ups.
‘OK, so here’s the story.’ Ellis had a Southern accent. Georgia? Tennessee? Gómez couldn’t be sure. ‘I have the two exhibits. I’m looking for anomalies common to both, little quirks in the text, in individual letters. Could be damage to the key, to the carriage, could be any damn thing.’
Gómez nodded. He knew the science.
‘And?’
‘We got ourselves a match. Three examples. Capital “M”, small “y”, small “e”. Blow these babies up and this is what you get.’
Gómez helped himself. Ellis was right. In every case, tiny nicks in the cast of the letters was duplicated across both documents.
‘So what’s the probability? Same machine? Both documents?’ O’Flaherty was back in charge.
He was looking at Ellis.
Ellis took his time, asked for the blow-ups back, peered at all three.
‘Ninety-five per cent,’ he said at last. ‘And that’s in a court of law.’
O’Flaherty was watching Gómez. He had something to add.
‘Donovan had pecker trouble,’ O’Flaherty said. ‘Couldn’t keep the fucking thing to himself. Guy I talked to in the Albuquerque office thinks he had another woman over the border.’
‘Like where?’
‘Guess.’
*
Eva came to bed mid-morning, the bedroom still curtained. She’d wheeled her father round to a friend’s house further down the village and now she and Stefan had a couple of hours to themselves. She slipped in through the door, a bowl of water in her hands, and asked whether he was warm enough. He nodded, watching her take her clothes off in the half-darkness. He wasn’t interested in what had led to this sudden reversal in his fortunes. Discovering why she’d so suddenly taken him into her bed could wait. All he wanted was her presence beside him, the touch of her naked skin, the chance to hold somebody else, to become – however briefly – part of something bigger than himself.
She was naked beside the bed. Stefan had spent a great deal of time over the past few days trying to imagine her body under the clothes she wore and he wasn’t disappointed. Far from it. Full breasts, flat stomach and a habit of running her hands up and down her thighs. She wanted to know whether he wanted to get rid of the splint.
‘Do you?’ Stefan was grinning.
She nodded and laughed. Once, drunk in Madrid, she said that she and her anarchist boyfriend had made love after she’d bound his legs together with a couple of leather belts. They both had a passion for experimenting, for pushing the limits. Juan had always attached it to some aesthetic theory or other, a visionary, mould-breaking act that was going to free the middle classes of all their hang-ups and turn them into human beings, but Eva had preferred to settle for something simpler.
‘Like what?’
‘Like enjoying it more. Like making it last.’
‘And did it?’
‘No.’ She giggled, her hand to her mouth. ‘He exploded. Bang. Like a firework. He always said it was my fault.’
‘I expect it was.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re very beautiful.’
‘And you?’
‘I’m very broken.’ He nodded down at his body. ‘But I won’t go bang.’
She unbuckled the splint and slipped the contraption off. Stefan heard it clatter to the floor. The bowl was on the sideboard beneath the window. She moistened her hands and returned to the bed, soaping his body very slowly, feet first, her fingers working between his toes, one after the other, then girdling his ankles, then up along the swelling line of his uninjured calf. Time and again she returned to the bowl for fresh water, more soap, until every inch of his body had been washed. Stefan had never felt so clean.
‘Have you done this before?’
‘Yes.’
‘With Juan?’
‘Many times.’
‘And others?’
‘Not so often.’
‘I’d like to do it to you.’
‘You can’t,’ she laughed. ‘You have to trust me. And you have to wait.’
She was back with the scar on his thigh. Agustín’s stitches were still in place, tiny black knots against the whiteness of his flesh. Eva plucked at one, a tiny delicate tug.
‘You feel that?’
‘Yes.’
‘It hurts?’
‘No.’
‘Juan also had stitches. I took them out. We had no knife, no scissors. I used my teeth.’
‘You want to do that to me?’
‘And tell Agustín?’ She laughed again. ‘No.’
She fetched a towel from a drawer and dried him all over. Then she slipped into the bed beside him and drew up the blankets. A perfect fit. She was up on one elbow, fingering his face, tracing the line of his mouth, testing the fullness of his beard.
‘I can shave you. Would you like that?’
‘Very much.’
‘Maybe later. When we have more time.’
She wanted to know whether he shaved at sea. Every photo she’d ever seen of submariners, the men had beards.
‘That’s right. We never shave at sea.’
‘Why not?’
‘Water is too precious.’
‘Of course.’ Her hand was crabbing slowly across his belly. ‘You know what we say in Spain? Clean on the outside, clean on the inside. You know what I used to say to Juan? To be clean is to be ready. You think you’re ready?’
Stefan nodded, no longer ashamed of his helplessness. Then he reached down and caught her hand.
‘You said later,’ he murmured. ‘Will there be a later?’
‘I don’t know.’
‘Do you want there to be a later?’
‘Sí.’
‘Why?’
‘Because you’re a good man. Because of what you’ve seen, what you’ve felt.’ She withdrew her hand and cupped it over one breast. ‘Felt? You understand?’
‘Sí.’
‘War changes people. You think that?’
‘War empties people.’
‘Empties people? Muy bueno. I like that. Very much.’
‘It emptied you?’
‘It robbed me.’
‘Of Juan?’
‘Sí. And of many other things.’ She glanced up at the first communion photo on the wall. ‘You cannot go to war and come back like that.’
‘Innocent?’
‘Exacto. You go to war, you see many things, and afterwards you have to make yourself better. With small things.’
‘Like this?’
‘This isn’t a small thing, Stefan. Not for me.’ She straddled him, the long fall of black hair curtaining both their faces. Then she slowly worked him inside herself, tiny movements, spooning out their time together in the bareness of this room, and Stefan let himself drift away, protected at last from his memories, content to let her take control, deeply happy that they’d chosen to be so honest with each other and so reckless.
Much later, early afternoon, she stirred beside him. She had to fetch her father. His friend was very kind but Tomaso couldn’t stand his wife’s cooking.
‘You want meat tonight? Sheep? Agustín says you must. To get better.’
Stefan said it didn’t matter. Whatever Tomaso liked, he’d gladly eat. He gestured for her to come closer. He wanted to say thank you. And he wanted to know whether he could stay in this bed.
‘You want to?’
‘Not alone.’
‘You think you have a choice?’
‘I think you have a choice.’
‘About what?’
‘About later.’ He looked up at her. ‘You really want a later? Because now is the time to tell me.’
‘Sí.’ She nodded. ‘A later? Claro que sí.’
12
J. Edgar Hoover was back in DC by mid-afternoon. His secretary had cleared a half-hour slot at four thirty and it was O’Flaherty who passed on the good news to Hector Gómez. They’d spent the day together running a variety of scenarios around Sol Fiedler’s death and now had come the moment when they had to share their thinking with the Boss. FBI headquarters was several blocks away from Q Street. They walked.
Gómez had never met Hoover but like every agent he knew a great deal about the fussy little guy who’d seized the Bureau by the throat way back in the twenties and had never let go since. This was a man who understood that knowledge was the currency of power. This was the guy who’d painstakingly built huge files around anyone who could block his way or dilute his influence. In the early days they called him ‘Speed’ because he did everything – everything – at a thousand miles an hour. Since then, his nicknames had been less flattering.
Hoover’s offices were on the sixth floor of the FBI building. The corridor from the bank of elevators was known inf
ormally as ‘The Bridge of Sighs’. When the secretary tapped twice on the big oak door and then stood respectfully aside, O’Flaherty and Gómez found Hoover sitting behind a huge desk, pen in hand, reviewing a sheaf of documents. He glanced up, barely acknowledging their presence, then scribbled a couple of signatures.
‘Take a seat,’ he said at last. ‘Tell me about Fiedler.’ High voice, Gómez thought. Almost squeaky.
O’Flaherty launched into a brief. Sensibly he kept to the facts. At this stage, Hoover wanted the basics. Only later, according to O’Flaherty, would you be invited to sign up to whatever decision the great man had decided to take.
O’Flaherty had finished. Hoover was looking at Gómez. He wore a star sapphire ring on the little finger of his left hand and from time to time, like a nervous twitch, he’d play with it.
‘So what’s it like up there?’
‘Where, sir?’
‘Up on the Hill, among all those infant geniuses? I read a coupla your reports. I guess the Project keeps them busy.’
‘Certainly does, sir.’
‘History in the making? You get that feeling?’
‘Not really. From where I’m sitting it’s pretty much like any job. Except the place isn’t supposed to exist.’
Hoover nodded and sat briefly back in his chair. The President had put Hoover in charge of all intelligence operations, leading the charge against foreign spies, and it rankled him that General Groves and a bunch of Jewboy scientists had managed to fence off dozens of sites across the nation from his prying eyes. Hence the bid to smuggle Gómez into the heart of the Project, the Bureau’s eyes and ears on the Hill.
‘You think he killed himself? This Sol Fiedler?’
‘No, sir.’
‘Care to tell me why?’
Gómez summed up his doubts in a couple of sentences. The typed letter. Calling his wife ‘Liebling’. His hatred of guns. His passion for his wife. His commitment to the Project. The reputation he’d built among his buddies in the Tech Area. No one had a bad word to say about Sol Fiedler. Except he could come across as overly shy.
Finisterre Page 17
