by Ken Follett
At five he left for the day.
On the way home he stopped at a barbershop and bought a straight razor, the folding kind where the blade slid into the handle. The barber said: ‘You’ll find it better than a safety razor, with your beard.’
Greg was not going to shave with it.
His home was his father’s permanent suite at the Ritz-Carlton. When Greg arrived, Lev and Gladys were having cocktails.
He remembered meeting Gladys for the first time in this room seven years ago, sitting on the same yellow silk couch. She was an even bigger star now. Lev had put her in a series of shamelessly gung-ho war movies in which she defied sneering Nazis, outwitted sadistic Japanese, and nursed square-jawed American pilots back to health. She was not quite as beautiful as she had been at twenty, Greg observed. The skin of her face did not have the same perfect smoothness; her hair did not seem so luxuriant; and she was wearing a brassiere, which she would undoubtedly have scorned before. But she still had dark-blue eyes that seemed to issue an irresistible invitation.
Greg accepted a martini and sat down. Was he really going to defy his father? He had not done it in the seven years since he had first shaken Gladys’s hand. Perhaps it was time.
I’ll do it just the way he would, Greg thought.
He sipped his drink and set it down on a side table with spidery legs. Speaking conversationally, he said to Gladys: ‘When I was fifteen, my father introduced me to an actress called Jacky Jakes.’
Lev’s eyes widened.
‘I don’t think I know her,’ said Gladys.
Greg took the razor from his pocket, but did not open it. He held it in his hand as if feeling its weight. ‘I fell in love with her.’
Lev said: ‘Why are you dragging this ancient history up now?’
Gladys sensed the tension and looked anxious.
Greg went on: ‘Father was afraid I might want to marry her.’
Lev laughed mockingly. ‘That cheap tart?’
‘Was she a cheap tart?’ Greg said. ‘I thought she was an actress.’ He looked at Gladys.
Gladys flushed at the implied insult.
Greg said: ‘Father paid her a visit, and took with him a colleague, Joe Brekhunov. Have you met him, Gladys?’
‘I don’t believe so.’
‘Lucky you. Joe has a razor like this.’ Greg snapped the razor open, showing the gleaming sharp blade.
Gladys gasped.
Lev said: ‘I don’t know what game you think you’re playing—’
‘Just a minute,’ Greg said. ‘Gladys wants to hear the rest of the story.’ He smiled at her. She looked terrified. He said: ‘My father told Jacky that if she ever saw me again, Joe would cut her face with his razor.’
He jerked the knife, just a little, and Gladys gave a small scream.
‘The hell with this,’ Lev said, and took a step towards Greg. Greg raised the hand holding the razor. Lev stopped.
Greg did not know whether he would be able to cut his father. But Lev did not know either.
‘Jacky lives right here in Washington,’ Greg said.
His father said crudely: ‘Are you fucking her again?’
‘No. I’m not fucking anyone, though I have plans for Margaret Cowdry.’
‘The cookie heiress?’
‘Why, do you want Joe to threaten her too?’
‘Don’t be stupid.’
‘Jacky is a waitress now – she never got the movie part she was hoping for. I run into her on the street sometimes. Today she served me in a restaurant. Every time she sees my face, she thinks Joe is going to come after her.’
‘She’s out of her mind,’ Lev said. ‘I’d forgotten all about her until five minutes ago.’
‘Can I tell her that?’ Greg said. ‘I think by now she’s entitled to her peace of mind.’
‘Tell her whatever the hell you like. For me she doesn’t exist.’
‘That’s great,’ said Greg. ‘She’ll be pleased to hear it.’
‘Now put that damn blade away.’
‘One more thing. A warning.’
Lev looked angry. ‘You’re warning me?’
‘If anything bad happens to Jacky – anything at all . . .’ Greg moved the razor side to side, just a little.
Lev said scornfully: ‘Don’t tell me you’re going to cut Joe Brekhunov.’
‘No.’
Lev showed a hint of fear. ‘You’d cut me?’
Greg shook his head.
Angrily, Lev said: ‘What, then, for Christ’s sake?’
Greg looked at Gladys.
She took a second to catch his drift. Then she jerked back in her silk-upholstered chair, put both hands on her cheeks as if to protect them, and gave another little scream, louder this time.
Lev said to Greg: ‘You little asshole.’
Greg folded the razor and stood up. ‘It’s how you would have handled it, Father,’ he said.
Then he went out.
He slammed the door and leaned against the wall, breathing as hard as if he had been running. He had never felt so scared in his life. Yet he also felt triumphant. He had stood up to the old man, used his own tactics back on him, even scared him a little.
He walked to the elevator, pocketing the razor. His breathing eased. He looked back along the hotel corridor, half expecting his father to come running after him. But the door of the suite remained closed, and Greg boarded the elevator and went down to the lobby.
He entered the hotel bar and ordered a dry martini.
(iii)
On Sunday Greg decided to visit Jacky.
He wanted to tell her the good news. He remembered the address – the only piece of information he had ever paid a private detective for. Unless she had moved, she lived just the other side of Union Station. He had promised her he would not go there, but now he could explain to her that such caution was no longer necessary.
He went by cab. Crossing town, he told himself he would be glad to draw a line at last under his affair with Jacky. He had a soft spot for his first lover, but he did not want to be involved in her life in any way. It would be a relief to get her off his conscience. Then, next time he ran into her, she would not look scared to death. They could say hello, chat for a while, and walk on.
The cab took him to a poor neighbourhood of one-storey homes with low chain-link fences around small yards. He wondered how Jacky lived these days. What did she do during those evenings she was so keen to have to herself? No doubt she saw movies with her girlfriends. Did she go to Washington Redskins football games, or follow the Nats baseball team? When he had asked her about boyfriends, she had been enigmatic. Perhaps she was married and could not afford a ring. By his calculation she was twenty-four. If she was looking for Mr Right she should have found him by now. But she had never mentioned a husband, nor had the detective.
He paid off the taxi outside a small, neat house with flower pots in a concrete front yard – more domesticated than he had expected. As soon as he opened the gate he heard a dog bark. That made sense: a woman living alone might feel safer with a dog. He stepped on to the porch and rang the doorbell. The barking got louder. It sounded like a big dog, but that could be deceptive, Greg knew.
No one came to the door.
When the dog paused for breath, Greg heard the distinctive silence of an empty house.
There was a wooden bench on the stoop. He sat and waited a few minutes. No one came, and no helpful neighbour appeared to tell him whether Jacky was away for a few minutes, all day, or two weeks.
He walked a few blocks, bought the Sunday edition of the Washington Post, and returned to the bench to read it. The dog continued to bark intermittently, knowing he was still there. It was the first of November, and he was glad he had worn his olive-green uniform greatcoat and cap: the weather was wintry. Mid-term elections would be held on Tuesday, and the Post was predicting that the Democrats would take a beating because of Pearl Harbor. That incident had transformed America, and it came as a surprise to Greg to rea
lize that it had happened less than a year ago. Now American men of his own age were dying on an island no one had ever heard of called Guadalcanal.
He heard the gate click, and looked up.
At first Jacky did not notice him, and he had a moment to study her. She looked dowdily respectable in a dark coat and a plain felt hat, and she carried a book with a black cover. If he had not known her better, Greg would have thought she was coming home from church.
With her was a little boy. He wore a tweed coat and a cap, and he was holding her hand.
The boy saw Greg first, and said: ‘Look, Mommy, there’s a soldier!’
Jacky looked at Greg, and her hand flew to her mouth.
Greg stood up as they mounted the steps to the stoop. A child! She had kept that secret. It explained why she needed to be home in the evenings. He had never thought of it.
‘I told you never to come here,’ she said as she put the key in the lock.
‘I wanted to tell you that you need not be afraid of my father any more. I didn’t know you had a son.’
She and the boy stepped into the house. Greg stood expectantly at the door. A German shepherd growled at him then looked up at Jacky for guidance. Jacky glared at Greg, evidently thinking about slamming the door in his face; but after a moment she gave an exasperated sigh and turned away, leaving it open.
Greg walked in and offered his left fist to the dog. It sniffed warily and gave him provisional approval. He followed Jacky into a small kitchen.
‘It’s All Saints’ Day,’ Greg said. He was not religious, but at his boarding school he had been forced to learn all the Christian festivals. ‘Is that why you went to church?’
‘We go every Sunday,’ she replied.
‘This is a day of surprises,’ Greg murmured.
She took off the boy’s coat, sat him at the table, and gave him a cup of orange juice. Greg sat opposite and said: ‘What’s your name?’
‘Georgy.’ He said it quietly, but with confidence: he was not shy. Greg studied him. He was as pretty as his mother, with the same bow-shaped mouth, but his skin was lighter than hers, more like coffee with cream, and he had green eyes, unusual in a Negro face. He reminded Greg a little of his half-sister, Daisy. Meanwhile Georgy looked at Greg with an intense gaze that was almost intimidating.
Greg said: ‘How old are you, Georgy?’
He looked at his mother for help. She gave Greg a strange look and said: ‘He’s six.’
‘Six!’ said Greg. ‘You’re quite a big boy, aren’t you? Why . . .’
A bizarre thought crossed his mind, and he fell silent. Georgy had been born six years ago. Greg and Jacky had been lovers seven years ago. His heart seemed to falter.
He stared at Jacky. ‘Surely not,’ he said.
She nodded.
‘He was born in 1936,’ said Greg.
‘May,’ she said. ‘Eight and a half months after I left that apartment in Buffalo.’
‘Does my father know?’
‘Heck, no. That would have given him even more power over me.’
Her hostility had vanished, and now she just looked vulnerable. In her eyes he saw a plea, though he was not sure what she was pleading for.
He looked at Georgy with new eyes: the light skin, the green eyes, the odd resemblance to Daisy. Are you mine? he thought. Can it be true?
But he knew it was.
His heart filled with a strange emotion. Suddenly Georgy seemed terribly vulnerable, a helpless infant in a cruel world, and Greg needed to take care of him, make sure he came to no harm. He had an impulse to take the boy in his arms, but he realized that might scare him, so he held back.
Georgy put down his orange juice. He got off his chair and came around the table to stand close to Greg. With a remarkably direct look, he said: ‘Who are you?’
Trust a kid to ask the toughest question of all, Greg thought. What the hell was he going to say? The truth was too much for a six-year-old to take. I’m just a former friend of your mother’s, he thought; I was just passing the door, thought I’d say hello. Nobody special. May see you again, most likely not.
He looked at Jacky, and saw that pleading expression intensified. He realized what was on her mind: she was desperately afraid he was going to reject Georgy.
‘I tell you what,’ Greg said, and he lifted Georgy on to his knees. ‘Why don’t you call me Uncle Greg?’
(iv)
Greg stood shivering in the spectators’ gallery of an unheated squash court. Here, under the west stand of the disused stadium on the edge of the University of Chicago campus, Fermi and Szilard had built their atomic pile. Greg was impressed and scared.
The pile was a cube of grey bricks reaching the ceiling of the court, standing just shy of the end wall which still bore the polka-dot marks of hundreds of squash balls. The pile had cost a million dollars, and it could blow up the entire city.
Graphite was the material of which pencil leads were made, and it gave off a filthy dust that covered the floor and walls. Everyone who had been in the room a while was as black-faced as a coal miner. No one had a clean lab coat.
Graphite was not the explosive material – on the contrary, it was there to suppress radioactivity. But some of the bricks in the stack were drilled with narrow holes stuffed with uranium oxide, and this was the material that radiated the neutrons. Running through the pile were ten channels for control rods. These were thirteen-foot strips of cadmium, a metal that absorbed neutrons even more hungrily than graphite. Right now the rods were keeping everything calm. When they were withdrawn from the pile, the fun would start.
The uranium was already throwing off its deadly radiation, but the graphite and the cadmium were soaking it up. Radiation was measured by counters that clicked menacingly and a cylindrical pen recorder that was mercifully silent. The array of controls and meters near Greg in the gallery gave off the only heat in the place.
Greg visited on Wednesday 2 December, a bitterly cold, windy day in Chicago. Today for the first time the pile was supposed to go critical. Greg was there to observe the experiment on behalf of his boss, General Groves. He hinted jovially to anyone who asked that Groves feared an explosion and had deputed Greg to take the risk for him. In fact Greg had a more sinister mission. He was making an initial assessment of the scientists with a view to deciding who might be a security risk.
Security on the Manhattan Project was a nightmare. The top scientists were foreigners. Most of the rest were left-wingers, either Communists themselves or liberals who had Communist friends. If everyone suspicious was fired there would be hardly any scientists left. So Greg was trying to figure out which ones were the worst risks.
Enrico Fermi was about forty. A small, balding man with a long nose, he smiled engagingly while supervising this terrifying experiment. He was smartly dressed in a suit with a waistcoat. It was mid-morning when he ordered the trial to begin.
He instructed a technician to withdraw all but one of the control rods from the pile. Greg said: ‘What, all at once?’ It seemed frighteningly precipitate.
The scientist standing next to him, Barney McHugh, said: ‘We took it this far last night. It worked fine.’
‘I’m glad to hear it,’ said Greg.
McHugh, bearded and podgy, was low down on Greg’s list of suspects. He was American, with no interest in politics. The only black mark against him was a foreign wife: she was British – never a good sign, but not in itself evidence of treachery.
Greg had assumed there would be some sophisticated mechanism for moving the rods in and out, but it was simpler than that. The technician just put a ladder up against the pile, climbed halfway up it, and pulled out the rods by hand.
Speaking conversationally, McHugh said: ‘We were originally going to do this in the Argonne Forest.’
‘Where’s that?’
‘Twenty miles south-west of Chicago. Pretty isolated. Fewer casualties.’
Greg shivered. ‘So why did you change your minds and decide to do it ri
ght here on Fifty-seventh Street?’
‘The builders we hired went on strike, so we had to build the damn thing ourselves, and we couldn’t be that far away from the laboratories.’
‘So you took the risk of killing everyone in Chicago.’
‘We don’t think that will happen.’
Greg had not thought so, either, but he did not feel so sure now, standing a few feet away from the pile.
Fermi was checking his monitors against a forecast he had prepared of radiation levels at every stage of the experiment. Apparently the initial stage went according to plan, for he now ordered the last rod to be pulled halfway out.
There were some safety measures. A weighted rod hung poised to be dropped into the pile automatically if the radiation rose too high. In case that did not work, a similar rod was tied to the gallery railing with a rope, and a young physicist, looking as if he felt a bit silly, stood holding an axe, ready to cut the rope in an emergency. Finally three more scientists called the suicide squad were positioned near the ceiling, standing on the platform of the elevator used during construction, holding large jugs of cadmium sulphate solution, which they would throw on to the pile, as if dousing a bonfire.
Greg knew that neutron generation multiplied in thousandths of a second. However, Fermi argued that some neutrons took longer, perhaps several seconds. If Fermi was right, there would be no problem. But if he was wrong, the squad with the jugs and the physicist with the axe would be vaporized before they could blink.
Greg heard the clicking become more rapid. He looked anxiously at Fermi, who was doing calculations with a slide-rule. Fermi looked pleased. Anyway, Greg thought, if things go wrong it will probably happen so fast that we’ll never know anything about it.
The rate of clicking levelled off. Fermi smiled and gave the order for the rod to be pulled out another six inches.
More scientists were arriving, climbing the stairs to the gallery in their heavyweight Chicago-winter clothing, coats and hats and scarves and gloves. Greg was appalled at the lack of security. No one was checking credentials: any one of these men could have been a spy for the Japanese.
Among them Greg recognized the great Szilard, tall and heavy, with a round face and thick curly hair. Leo Szilard was an idealist who had imagined nuclear power liberating the human race from toil. It was with a heavy heart that he had joined the team designing the atom bomb.
