His nostrils caught a sharp metallic scent. “Don’t breathe.”
They were doing maybe sixty now and he saw a farm truck pulled off, the driver getting out of the cab to look. They flashed by it and Karl saw the uranium was indeed in glittering black droplets, spilling down the air. Eddies churned and dampened the road ahead. The sky lightened.
“Good, got through it,” Moe said. He kept their speed high.
“I’ll open the vent full. See if we can blow out anything that got in.”
“Great. How much of a dose do you think—”
“Can’t be much.” He coughed, and so did Moe. “Get it out, right.”
“They mixed it with water, I bet.” Karl looked back through the smudged plastic back window. The plane was out of sight and the cloud wafted around the road, settling in after the exhaust of the jet stopped roiling it. “To keep it from blowing away, drop it right on the road. As soon as the drops evap away, it’s free to get in our lungs.”
“Using it on each highway. They’ve got a lot of it.”
Karl nodded, inhaling the moist, crisp air of late summer in the Alps. “I wonder why.”
5.
They reached the town of Gap late in a damp night. Troops were few, having already pushed beyond, to Grenoble. Moe did his trick of finding a decent hotel, and they stayed away from the GIs who wandered the streets, looking for booze. But they did find a little restaurant with a classic zinc bar. Karl flashed some of the USA-made francs and talked the owner into a bottle of Côtes du Rhône. Once the other patrons saw they were Americans but not soldiers, smiles blossomed. Karl’s rusty French helped. Halfway through the bottle a pianist came in and banged out songs on a dilapidated stand-up piano that needed tuning. The pianist even played some jazz, shouting, “Laissez les bons temps rouler!”
Karl whispered, “Let the good times roll,” and Moe nodded. Somehow, without Karl even noticing, Moe had talked a lovely girl into bringing them hot crepes. The world had improved, for the moment.
Still, Karl didn’t sleep well. They got a coffee-and-baguette breakfast and Moe went in search of refueling. Karl followed, walking to stretch his legs, to an army depot that was really just a co-opted gas station. They were still getting more petrol from a cylindrical truck, just filling the underground tanks. Moe’s letters cleared all obstacles. Men moved quickly but there was a line of trucks, so they joined it. A sergeant took the wheel, waiting in line for them, obviously impressed with Moe’s letters.
They strolled along a small stream and abruptly came upon a surprise. Some American soldiers were burying the bodies of many Germans they had killed the day before, in a last-stand shootout to protect the gas station. Karl stared at the sprawled bodies, riddled by mortars, machine-gun fire, and grenades. Whole lives, traded for a bit of ground and gasoline.
One of the Germans had lost his head. A GI kicked it like a soccer ball. Then another guy. They started laughing maniacally. A sergeant said, “Fer Chrissake, yer animals.” That made things even funnier to them until the sergeant ordered them back to their work. Moe discussed the event as really an extended aesthetic problem, rather than a moral problem. The German was dead and the GIs under pressure. Maybe a buddy had been killed here in the attack. “But denying the veneer of civilization is what helps you do inhumane things,” Moe said, “so the sergeant is right.”
The Germans had plainly not counted on the Americans having mortar teams that hammered relentlessly, pouring in dozens of rounds to simply demolish their defenses. The bodies had rotted a bit until the GIs had time to finish their battles and pull out the corpses. “They thought we’d try to rush ’em,” a rail-thin Southerner said with a chuckle. “They’re always amazed we have so much ammo.”
Wait till you see what’s coming next, Karl thought with relish, but said nothing. The next A-bomb—the term invented by Wells had caught on, despite its error—would be ready within a week Where to use it was a frequent topic back at the base in England; Karl had no opinion.
The burial teams wore thin cloth strips that hung little bags of camphor under their noses. Once Karl got a whiff of the bodies he knew why. Moe’s only comment was, “The surest way to become a pacifist is to join the infantry.”
While they waited back near the fuel depot, some GIs coaxed Moe into a baseball game they had set up on a soccer field. Once Moe threw the ball, the guys knew they had someone different in the game. He snapped it around in arrow-straight volleys. To Karl’s eye, his throwing motion was a kind of muscular drawl. Nobody had gloves, but Moe easily snagged balls out of the air. If GIs snagged Moe’s throws, they yowled and dropped the ball. When he came to bat, which they made him do right away, he knocked the scruffy ball into the distant woods. Someone called out, “You’re that catcher!” and they crowded around. Moe’s casual, pleasant manner as he dealt with them reminded Karl of the man’s fundamental talent: people liked him. By that time the gas station was ready, so Karl got their Jeep cleaned up and Moe came ambling back, grinning.
“Feel good to play again?”
Moe laughed. “It’s always good.”
As they drove north, Moe said, “My high school English teacher pointed out that baseball is a mythic game. She was having an affair with my baseball coach, the PE head, so the topic came up. You start at home, see, but you want to leave home. To do that you must face a challenge. If you face that ordeal and are successful, you may go out into the world and travel—three destinations, each well defined and defended. But even as you go, your goal is to return to the happiness and safety of home.”
“Wow, baseball as a myth?” It felt good to talk, talk about anything; much better than pointless thinking.
“I think baseball is fundamental to Americans because it’s a character-versus-character sport. Pitcher versus batter, batter versus fielder. Two characters contesting. Not like soccer, the big European sport. That’s all teams passing the ball, footwork, and only a final two-person contest with the goalie. Different cultures entirely. Makes Americans more than imitation Euros.”
Karl laughed. “So you’re a catcher, a spy, and a philosopher, too.”
“In this game you gotta be.”
• • •
It took a full day to reach Grenoble. Here, too, an odd serenity prevailed. The Germans made no effort to defend all of France now. People sought bargains in shops with mostly bare shelves. Years of constrained trade had made scarcity the norm.
Karl helped find their way to a small army detachment trying to get oriented. He helped a cliché Brooklyn sergeant negotiate in French with the locals. They left off the Jeep with a master sergeant who had too much to do. “This is a good break,” Moe said. “We can just take a train to Zurich.”
“I wonder if Heisenberg will even come to give his speech.”
Moe nodded, lifting his hat in ironic salute. “Me too. That’s how this game goes, mostly. But he likes to travel, and Switzerland is the only place his keepers will let him go.”
“Fair enough.” Newspapers said the Allies had been halted in the Rhône Valley by the death dust. Troops who would bravely face heavy fire balked at breathing in poisons. The same stalemate prevailed at the “western wall,” where the German tank divisions were holding firm.
Karl wanted to get back to his family and out of this war. Maybe this one more thing would do it? He got on the wheezing train with more fear than hope.
PART XII
* * *
STALKING WITH EINSTEIN
Chance is a nickname for Providence.
—Nicolas Chamfort
1.
August 20, 1944
It felt odd to sit comfortably in the first-class section of the rumbling train, watching the gray mountain passes and lovely sky-blue lakes at the peak of summer, and read of many bloody deaths, only a few hundred kilometers away.
Moe had gotten the tickets without trouble, because the price was exorbitant. Also, first class were the only seats still open. People were fleeing from the battle ar
ea into Switzerland. Many carried stuffed suitcases and even canvas bags.
Karl had talked to a portly gentleman about this while he waited in the Grenoble station. The man had a W. C. Fields nose, a red-veined bulb. It sat below watery blue eyes behind rimless glasses, eyes wary and wise. “My wife and I, we will maintain to the Swiss border guards that we are merely vacationing for a week or so. The Swiss, they look the other way. Let the Geneva authorities worry about an excess of ‘tourists’!” His cheeks bulged merrily at the thought. “After all, we bring money. The Swiss have profited well from this war.”
Karl nodded. He had said nearly nothing in the last few hours, not to draw attention to his American-accented French. Moe sat silently reading his six newspapers. Karl read a London Times report on the fight in Normandy. The death dust had stopped Patton’s flanking movement, but the Germans fleeing east had run into a pincer flanking attack.
The pocket area is full of the remains of battle. Villages destroyed and derelict equipment make some roads impassable. Corpses of soldiers and civilians litter the area. Thousands of dead cattle and horses lie on recent fields of fire. In this hot August, maggots crawl over the bodies, hordes of flies descend. Pilots report being able to smell the stench of the battlefield hundreds of feet above it.
Even Eisenhower issued a statement.
The battlefield at Falaise was unquestionably one of the greatest “killing fields” of any of the war areas. Forty-eight hours after the closing of the gap I was conducted through it on foot, to encounter scenes that could be described only by Dante. It was literally possible to walk for hundreds of yards at a time, stepping on nothing but dead and decaying flesh. Many swollen bodies had to be shot to expunge gasses within them before they could be burnt and bulldozers were used to clear the area of dead animals.
Karl knew now far more about what it meant to be a soldier here. The death dust dominated the news, though it was too soon to see mentioned the dust drop they had seen the day before.
Men who reported “rad sick” showed nausea and vomiting, and predispositions to infection and bleeding. The only response has been for units to flee the dust area.
Swiss guards boarded at the station just before the border crossing. Karl and Moe sat beside each other silently, handing over their counterfeit French passports. The guards’ questions they managed to answer with only “Oui.” The W. C. Fields guy had been right.
They pulled into Geneva and quickly changed trains for Lausanne. Moe managed to snag two more newspapers in Italian and German. They pulled out of the station and coasted along the serene blue of the big lake as Moe restlessly sorted through the papers. “Nothing much new here,” he said scornfully. “Mostly German propaganda about how they’re inflicting huge casualties and holding their ground. Nothing much about the dust.”
“Usually these days they brag about their new technologies,” Karl said, musing as he gazed out the window at placid, beautiful mountains.
“Oh, there’s plenty on V-1s and V-2s. But the dust, no. Probably since it’s a war crime under the Geneva Protocol, I’d guess.”
War crime . . . , Karl thought. He took the German Zeitung from Moe and sure enough, they were full of stories about the victims of the Berlin bomb. Plenty of pictures with vivid captions. On walls, “flash-burned” shadows of people vaporized. People dissolved into gas and desiccated carbon statues. An old man seemingly tap-dancing, trying to walk on legs with gnarled feet. Children with their skin pulled away by searing winds. His work.
He sat back and let go of the moment. He had to focus here. This whole attempt to get to Heisenberg was spying, and he had no idea how to do it. He had simply gone along with Groves and the others, hoping that Moe would actually do the skullduggery or whatever, leading to the interrogation of Heisenberg—somehow.
The scenery rolled by without his seeing it. After a while he turned to Moe, getting up his courage, opened his mouth—and saw Moe had tossed aside the newspapers and was reading a small hardcover book, The Mask of Dimitrios by Eric Ambler. “Uh, isn’t that . . . ?”
“A spy novel? Sort of. Really enjoying it.”
“Doesn’t that give away . . .”
“What we’re doing?” Moe chuckled. “Look, ordinary people read such novels too. I do. Maybe I’ll pick up something useful.”
“But I thought those sort of books were just—”
“The seductress in black velvet, the British secret-service numbskull hero, the omnipotent spymaster, ominous villains with trick knives in umbrellas?”
“Well, yes. Useless to us.”
“There’s plenty of that junk. But this Ambler knows some clever things.”
“You’ve got your experience to rely on. I’ve got none. You dropped into eastern Europe, Norway, got—”
“Good judgment comes from experience, sure. Experience comes from bad judgment.”
“You didn’t get caught.”
“To be ignored, look confident, or even bored. Don’t look around much.”
“That won’t be easy, with Heisenberg. He must know a lot about their uranium, at least.”
“Right. They’re using his uranium as dust. Whether he’s running a bomb program may be secondary now.”
Karl shrugged. “Too many maybes in this war. When do we meet Heisenberg?”
“My contact at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule is Paul Scherrer. He says the main reason the Germans come there now is to enjoy the schnapps, cheese, and chocolates that they can’t get at home. Heisenberg speaks tomorrow.”
“How do we approach him?”
“Scherrer will introduce us. Well, maybe just me.”
By now Karl knew Moe enough to know the man would reveal information only when it was useful in the events drawing near. That way, if questioned, Karl had little to reveal. So he sat silently until Moe added, “Because I might have to shoot Heisenberg.”
Karl decided to downplay what was coming. “Ironic—this Hochschule is where Einstein got his first degree, yes? Then he couldn’t get a real physics job, so he took a post as a patent examiner in the Bern office.”
“Ah yeah, I met him once when I was at Princeton. I stopped him on the street—everybody recognized him—and he said, ‘Pardon me, sorry! Always I am mistaken for Professor Einstein’ and brushed me off. But I knew the truth. Princeton’s a small burg.”
Karl recalled the somber Einstein he had met, to get the letter to Roosevelt worked out and signed. What would have happened if Einstein hadn’t been persuaded by Szilard? The Manhattan Project would’ve started much later. He would not be here now, in far over his head, rushing downstream over the foaming white rapids of history, rocks all around, in a tiny little boat. . . .
“So we just show up for the Heisenberg talk? And I signal you if I think Heisenberg’s shown any sign of a bomb program?”
“Some scouting first, but yeah—just go in cold.”
This didn’t seem to bother Moe, but it certainly unnerved Karl.
“The food’s good around here, so it won’t be a complete waste,” Moe said contentedly.
2.
August 21, 1944
Karl would not have chosen the fine old Zurich hotel along the lake, but Moe brushed aside objections that they should maintain a low profile. They had breakfast on the veranda, Moe with his newspapers and Karl savoring the best coffee he had found in years. The hotel manager had even placed a small chocolate beside his cup, a hint that they mixed well—which was true. Karl felt an odd guilt at enjoying the serene peace and pleasures of a nation not at war.
“I’m unsure who to be at this event,” Moe said, putting down his issue of Le Monde.
“I think I’ll stick with my French passport, since it’s all I’m carrying.”
“I’ve used three identities in Europe, passports to match—a Swiss physics student, an Arab businessman from Algeria, a French businessman from Dijon. If Heisenberg’s tenders ask, I can show one of those.”
“You’re a bit old to be a stud
ent.”
“Fair enough. All right, I’m a professor from . . . ah, I see your point. Anyone at the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule is bound to know the Swiss physicists.”
Moe’s dark complexion made the conclusion clear. “Make it an Arab studying here,” Karl said. “That explains your inept French accent. Maybe slur it a little too.”
“Good! I had the manager ring the Hochschule, too. Heisenberg speaks at four p.m. Reception after, I’ll bet. They make a big show of him when he visits. Even the manager knew he was in town. He says all the bourgeoisie are agog to have the great man among them.”
Moe’s French accent was lapsing amid the German speakers of Zurich, so his own East Coast vowels came out as boojwazzee with hints of Jersey. “We should clam up this afternoon,” Karl said. “You’re going as an Arab, I’m supposedly French, but face it—to the Germans we’ll sound funny.”
“Right. We’ll sit up front, and you’ll pick up on Heisenberg’s technical stuff. We need a code phrase that tips me off to whether he’s got a bomb program going.”
“I’ll say, uh, ‘necessary and sufficient.’ ”
The Berlin Project Page 33
