The One Man

by Andrew Gross

  “A thousand bombs…” Leo looked at the flattened-out drawing again. “And all from this? This diffusion process?”

  Alfred shrugged guiltily. “My friend Bohr postulated that the bombardment of a small amount of the pure isotope U-235 with slow neutron particles of atoms was sufficient to start a chain reaction great enough to blow up his laboratory, his building, and everything in the surrounding countryside for miles. If you can separate the isotope, Leo … And in sufficient quantities.” He nodded. “There’s your answer, boy.”

  Leo sat back down. He saw the pallor on the old man’s face and his eyes grew solemn. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry I crumpled your drawing, Professor…”

  “That’s okay. Happens, from time to time. Among colleagues. Look, I know this is difficult. I know your head is loaded with things I haven’t fully explained. I know you’d rather be playing chess in whatever time is free here. Indisputably, I know your new opponent is a lot more captivating than me to look at.”

  Leo grinned, a hint of guilt in his blush once more. “So who is it you want me to get this information to? All you’ve crammed in my head. If I make it out.”

  “Scientists.” Alfred shrugged. “Famous ones. They will want to see this. Maybe in Britain. Or even America.”

  “America?” Leo’s eyes grew wide. “That is a dream, Professor.”

  “Yes. It’s a dream. But, trust me, it’s no dream that they will want you when they hear what it is you know. They will need you. They will.”

  They both sat for a while, staring at the diagram. Leo seemed to be taking it all in. A bomb. The size of a thousands bombs. In one. Larger and far more devastating than the world had ever seen. The kind of knowledge that turns a boy into a man.

  Then Leo looked back up at Alfred and said, without a blink in his eye: “Neutron density for coordinates, small p, small o, small zed, equals the neutron small p times small p, times the neutron small o times small o, times the neutron small zed times small zed … where p equals a cylinder’s radius, o equals the angle between the diameter and the radius, and zed equals the cylinder’s height.”

  “Perfect.” Alfred’s eyes lit up. He clapped lightly.

  “See, I am smart,” Leo said.

  “Yes, you are.” Alfred coughed again, his whole body rattling.

  “You’re sick. I should take you to the infirmary.”

  “It’s just a cold. And if you don’t get better in there in two or three days, you know where the send you … up the chimney.”

  “And if you don’t get better out here, who will deliver your theories and equations?” Leo asked.

  “You have a point there,” Alfred conceded.

  They sat for a while, the boy’s head swimming with what Alfred had told him. Then he said, “We’ll both get out.” He met Alfred’s eyes. “You’ll see. You’ll take your formulas and drawings to America.”

  “Now, that is a dream.” Alfred smiled back fondly.

  “Someone told me that there’s one thing they don’t get to take from you in here … and that’s your dreams.”

  “Yes, I believe that as well.” Alfred nodded.

  Leo looked at him with certainty. “We will. You’ll see.” Then he handed Alfred back the drawing. “We still have time. Teach me more.”

  TWENTY-FOUR

  He woke up in the night, shivering in sweat. He couldn’t remember exactly where he was or why he was in this scratchy bed gown. Only that his head was dizzy and reeling; his belly cramped. He called out, in the darkness: “Marte!” It was a warm night, yet he was shivering like it was January, not May. “Marte, where are you?”

  “Shut up, old man!” the person in the bunk next to him growled.

  Who is that? Alfred had a sense of someone staring over him.

  “Shit, he’s got the fever,” his bunkmate said.

  “I’m so cold,” Alfred said, teeth chattering. “Help me,” he called to anyone who would hear. “Oh God,” he shot up, “my stomach…”

  They rushed a bucket to him from the latrine and he let it all out, retching his insides over the side of the bunk.

  “The Professor’s sick. We have to get him out of here,” he heard someone say.

  No, please. You can’t. Not yet.

  Instinctively, he still knew that letting them take him to the infirmary would only result in his death. He heard a commotion—voices, cursing, people gathered around.

  “I’m sorry,” he muttered. “Where’s Marte?”

  “Your wife’s dead, old man,” he heard someone tell him.

  Yes, that’s right. She’s dead. Lucy too. Both dead.

  “Wrap him in a blanket and keep him in the back,” a voice said. Ostrow the forager. “In the morning we’ll take him to the infirmary.”

  “If he makes it to morning,” someone wagered.

  “Hang in there, old man.” Ullie, the baker.

  He felt himself lifted in the air. Almost, as if he could see what was happening below. Three people carried him, mummified, to the rear of the block where the sick were kept.

  Maybe this was best. Maybe it was time to just give up. Marte would be waiting for him with his tea and almond biscuits and the afternoon paper.

  “Professor, you’re going to be all right. Just hang in there,” someone exhorted.

  “Christ, he’s burning up!”

  “He’s got it bad,” he heard another voice say.

  “Get him some water.” A minute later, he felt a thin stream of warm liquid moisten his parched lips.

  “Thank you.”

  In a flash of lucidity, he came out of the delirium for a moment and realized what it was he had. As a man of science, he knew what it meant. It was like a death sentence in here. The disease hadn’t yet reached his bowels. That was good. Still, it was fifty-fifty. At best. But in here, where no one gave a shit whether you lived or died, who could know?

  He couldn’t die. Not yet.

  There was still more work to do.

  The voices died down. He lay there, bundled up, chattering like when he was a boy and went skating with his father on a frozen lake in the mountains and fell through a thin patch of ice and his father had to fish him out. It all seemed so real to him. The pond. His father’s grasp. In his life, he had never felt so cold.

  Then someone else’s face crept into his mind.

  The boy.

  We need more time, Alfred said to himself, though it was likely out loud, and anyone who heard would just think him delirious.

  It’s too soon.

  First thing is that you mustn’t give yourself over to the fever, he told himself. You must keep your wits.

  Your brain.

  Fighting the urge to drift off, the oddest thing came into his mind. His friend Polanyi’s principle of chain reactions. A chemist, of all things. What was it now? “One center of a chemical reaction produces thousands of product molecules, which occasionally have a favorable encounter with a reactant and instead of forming only one new center, form two or even more, each of which is in turn capable of engendering a new reaction chain…”

  An expression of it being 1; 2; 4; 8; 16; 32; 64; 128; 256; 512 …

  He lay there shivering but calculating it out. 1,024; 2,048; 4,096; 8,192; 16,384; 32,768; 65,536; 131,072 …

  How much farther can you extend it?

  262,144; 524,288; 1,048,576; 2,097,152; 4,194,304 … 8,388,608.

  16,777,216.

  Inside, he smiled.

  You can’t die yet, Alfred. There’s still more for him to learn.

  You haven’t discussed the Displacement Principle yet. Or your views on the composition of the diffuser membrane.

  To his amazement, a universe of numbers and equations, spheres and mathematical proofs danced out of the darkness, swirling, reaching toward him.

  Not yet. Please. It’s too soon, he told himself. You can’t. There’s still much more to learn.

  But, Marte, you should see this! he said in wonderment. The sky was lit with numbers and equat
ions. I’ll be there soon. He stopped fighting. A heaviness was making him close his eyes.

  It’s too soon, he repeated. But it’s all so beautiful!

  TWENTY-FIVE

  MAY 20

  NEWMARKET RACE COURSE, SUFFOLK, ENGLAND

  The whir of propellers and the heavy drone of bombers taking off to drop their loads over the continent was a constant backdrop here. In the past two days, they had been battering the coast of France and pounding factories in the German homeland night and day.

  “Softening up the defenses,” Strauss said. “For the big one.” The forthcoming invasion. Everyone knew it was coming.

  “When?” Blum asked.

  The OSS captain shrugged. “Who knows? Soon.”

  Nathan had been in England for ten days. He and Strauss were being housed at this historic race course, once the site of two of the country’s Classics, seventy miles from London, now a bustling RAF base, home to the 75th squadron of Wellington and Stirling bombers. Assigned to them were two British MI-6ers, Majors Kendry and Riggs, and a Colonel Radjekowski, from the Armia Krajowa, the Polish Home Army based in London, who was to set up the contacts with the local resistance.

  On a strict diet, Blum had already lost eight pounds. His face, narrow to start with, now had the protruding cheekbones and sharp, gaunt jaw of someone living on a once-a-day diet meant only to keep you alive. Every night he inspected himself in the mirror in his quarters tucked away from the main barracks and saw his eyes grow dark and a bit more sunken.

  They taught him to jump. From practice ramps. Taught by an RAF sergeant major. The big one was yet to come.

  They worked on his gun skills, shooting at targets twenty yards away with a Colt 1911. Brushed up on his Polish, mostly slang and idioms, which had been dormant the past three years. Went over his identity. Mirek, his name was. A carpenter from the town of Gizycko in the lake country of Masuria. As a boy, Blum had shown a knack for woodworking. Such skills always have a place and value in the camp, Strauss said. And they pored over the maps. Over and over them. Endlessly. Maps of the surrounding area. The drop point, in a field near the Vistula, about twenty kilometers from the camp. The extraction location, a quarter mile to the southeast. “Though not to worry too much on this, the partisans will get you there.” The endless memorization of local roads in case it was necessary. The little hamlet of Rajsko that was nearby. A safe house he could call on there should things go awry.

  “You mention the words ciasto wisniowe,” Radjekowski, the Polish intelligence officer, said.

  “Cherry pie?”

  “Short notice…” The officer shrugged apologetically.

  “No matter.” Kendry, the Brit major with a pencil-thin mustache, tapped out his pipe. “Not to worry. If things do go awry on the ground, you’re probably dead anyway.”

  Blum smiled flatly. Kendry was a man he didn’t much care for. “I will try and improve on that, sir.”

  More maps. Maps of the camp itself, hand drawn by Vrba and Wetzler. Nathan went over them until his eyes ached. Every structure was committed to memory. The train tracks leading in. The front gate. The prisoners’ barracks, called blocks. The infirmary. The double perimeter of electrified wire. And the rectangular flat-roofed building he had asked about with Strauss and Colonel Donovan.

  The crematorium.

  Maps of the surrounding area outside the camp.

  “This is particularly important.” Strauss kept driving this one point home. “You must have this area one hundred percent committed to memory.”

  The IG Farben factory, which was under construction. The new train tracks almost leading to neighboring Birkenau. The surrounding woods and river. They went over and over these until Nathan had it all burned into his head as well as he did the neighborhood he grew up in back in Krakow.

  They gave him the file on Alfred Mendl, his man. Photos and photos. At scientific conferences, at the university where he taught. His kindly face, graying hair pulled over to the side, high forehead, round, doughy jaw. The mole on the left side of his nose.

  “He may not look like this now, so that mole will be your confirmation, Nathan. Look for it. Memorize every pore.”

  So he did, including every detail they had amassed on Mendl. Where he was born: Warsaw. Where he studied: the universities of Warsaw, Gottingen, and the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute in Berlin. His mentors: the famous Bohr, Otto Hahn, and Lise Meitner. His particular area of expertise: electromagnetic physics. The gaseous diffusion process. Whatever the hell that was. Mendl’s wife and daughter, Marte and Lucy, who were shipped to Auschwitz with him and were very likely dead. They still wouldn’t divulge the real reason why they needed him so badly. Why they were sending Nathan in.

  “In case you’re captured” was how Strauss explained it with merely a shrug. Blum saw the true meaning behind it.

  Captured and tortured, he meant.

  Back in his quarters, at night, Blum smoked and continued to read through Mendl’s file. Why him above all others? There were stray cats all over the base, foraging, and one of them hung around Blum’s quarters. A calico with wide, gray eyes. It reminded Blum of the cat they’d had on Grodzka Street. Leisa’s cat. The one they couldn’t bring with them to the ghetto. What was his name? Blum tried to recall.

  Ah, yes, Schubert, of course.

  Blum fed it crumbs of bread and let it lick the cream from uneaten desserts off his fingers. It brought back a life that seemed such a distant memory now. He preferred to remain by himself at night, going over his maps and files.

  “You see this man?” Blum showed the photo of Mendl to the cat, who had jumped up on his open window ledge. The calico meowed for some milk and arched his back. “I am expected to find him, in a camp of thousands. Maybe a hundred thousand. Crazy, is it not? I suspect even you must agree. And if I can’t … locate him, I may end up like you,” Blum said, scratching his back. He pulled off a bit of a tart. “Stuck there forever. Except no one is going to give me bits of cream and pastries…” He let the cat lick his fingers.

  “Since we’re at a race course, I suspect no one would bet too heavily on my success.” The cat meowed. “Ah, I see even you agree, Schubert, my friend.”

  Day Five, they finally showed him his uniform. Sewn by tailors specifically assigned to MI-6, it was a laborers’ outfit, loose fitting, with thin pants that reversed to a zebra-striped burlap tunic and pants. Every detail on it had been gone over with the escapees, Vrba and Wetzler. It came with a pair of tight-fitting wooden clogs that Blum had to squeeze his feet into.

  “A bit snug, I see?” Kendry bit on his pipe.

  “They’ll be fine.”

  “Probably a better fit than most in there, I suspect. You’ll have proper boots for the jump, of course, but you’ll have to ditch them before you go inside the camp.”

  A few days after that they met in a small meeting room on the base where the mission commanders generally briefed the pilots. Strauss stepped to the blackboard, a rough map of the camp and the surrounding area drawn on it. “I know you’ve been waiting to hear with a bit more detail how we’re planning to get you back,” he said with a smile.

  “A passing interest, yes.” Blum smiled too.

  Even Kendry chuckled behind him.

  “We’re told that camp labor is being used to help finish the new railroad tracks to Birkenau.” Strauss pointed to the blackboard. “Which is nothing but a death factory right next door. We have it that Hungarian Jews are being transported there and liquidated upon their arrival. By the thousands. Gassed.”

  “Thousands…” The number hit Blum like a blow to the head, and he muttered under his breath. “Pieprzy.” Fuck.

  “Every day. According to our sources, the work to finish these tracks goes on day and night. There seems to be quite a rush, it appears”—Strauss sniffed—“to ramp up the killings. What you’ve got to do is get yourself assigned to that particular work detail on the third night you are there. Vrba and Wetzler insist this is not a difficult task.
The guard who generally oversees this assignment, an Oberführer Rauch, is known to be open to a bribe. In fact, they claim this is an everyday occurrence in the camp for all sorts of things. In the case of the night detail, apparently there are some who actually desire this particular work detail as it gets you a second meal.”

  “Bribe? Bribe him with what?” Blum questioned.

  “More on that later … In the meantime, what is important is that on this particular night, at zero thirty hours, local partisans, who the colonel here assures me are quite ready and capable, will organize an attack on the work detail from the nearby woods. Here.” Strauss tapped his pointer against the blackboard. “This is why it’s so important that you have the surrounding terrain committed to memory. You—and Mendl, of course, we’re counting on—will run from the attack not toward the woods but toward the river. Here…” Strauss pointed. “It’s vital that amid the commotion you and Mendl make your way there, Nathan. You’ll be met and taken to the landing site. The plane will be set to land precisely at zero one thirty hours. The guards should be occupied for at least a few minutes, till reinforcements arrive, and it would seem logical that anyone looking to escape would run in the direction of the woods, where the partisans will be firing from, and not toward the river. In any case, the ambush will give you cover. Do you have all that?”

  Blum nodded. “Yes. I believe so.”

  “Of course, should you somehow be unable to find Mendl, or in the event he’s dead or in no condition to escape”—Strauss shrugged—“then it will just be you.”

  “I understand.”

  “So that’s the plan. We’ll go over everything several more times.” Strauss sat on the edge of the table. “I’m sure you have questions…”

  “Just one to start. I’m betting my life on the belief that the local Armia Krajowa will attack,” Blum said.

  “They will,” Radjekowski, the Polish colonel, said. “You can be sure of it.”

  “And”—Blum turned back to Strauss with a smile—“that this particular guard can be bribed.”

  “Yes.” Strauss tapped the pointer twice against the map. “That is the case. So…”