Moe said, “We need to talk to him privately.”
Scherrer’s English was far better than the rickety German of Karl and Moe. He said carefully, “You have seen his guards. I need to work within that constraint. I wish for you to hold your tongues until I can get a small chat with him tonight.”
Karl remembered his great truth, learned in the project: Never pass by a chance to shut up. Yes.
“He says he’s working on his matrix theory and cosmic rays,” Scherrer said in his brisk clip. “A bit on nuclear work, but the program is in the hands of the experimenters. They’re trying to build an Uranmaschine, he described it as. I do not know quite what that means.”
“We do,” Moe said. “But not a bomb?”
“He said nothing of bombs, except that is why he moved the program, and his family.”
“What’s the setup for this dinner party?” Moe asked mildly. He still had the briefcase with him.
“We have a reception, then the buffet. People mingle. Later Werner will perhaps make a little speech.”
“And the Gestapo?”
“They are nominally escorts for Werner and that von Weizsäcker, his experimental head. So they take part, mingling with the Lausanne notables and other guests.”
“I hope you have a good bar,” Moe said jovially.
“Ah, alas, this war imposes some hardships. The Hochschule provides a punch bowl, in fact several. The supper is light as well.”
“That’s fine,” Karl said. He was still full from the fine lunch. “We’re here to talk.”
“So I gather,” Scherrer said significantly, with a sideways glance. Moe had used his ingratiating talents well.
Moe nodded. “Remember, we’re Frenchmen—and me an Arab—with weak German skills.”
“Weak French, too,” Karl said.
“As I can tell,” Scherrer said wryly. “Never mind. These are mostly academics and political figures. They all like to talk far more than to listen.”
Karl gave him a chuckle at that. They entered the grand portico, nodded to the Swiss guards beside the wide doorway.
A Gestapo officer stood ramrod straight just inside, giving them the classic slit-eyed glare. Moe gave the man not a glance, just ambled in with his long strides. Karl followed, and they made their way without any fanfare. Nobody noticed them. The crowd murmur was already well lubricated by the three prominent punch bowls, arrayed along a very long table that also held the buffet.
A high gallery ran across the broad length of the room. A vast cowled fireplace stood empty, and people used its mantelpiece to rest their glasses of amber fluids while they gestured. Their animated hands flew as they talked with the cheery gaiety parties have when they are young. Karl pretended to inspect the inlaid paneling with ivory fittings as he eyed the crowd. The atmosphere was relaxed, moneyed.
Heisenberg stood at the focus of well-dressed Swiss, chatting amiably. Not far away were four obvious Gestapo types, this time in dark suits appropriate for the evening. The Obergruppenführer wore a severe black suit and a swastika emblem tie, red on black. He whispered orders to the others in officer-in-charge fashion. He was speaking to the nearest agent, who was an obvious cliché—big, ruddy, blond hair showing brown at the roots, teeth capped white, a smile both broad and mean. Karl tried to watch them sideways, and each time one of the Gestapo seemed to be looking back.
At least the Gestapo were off to one end of the room, easy to avoid. But near Heisenberg as well. “I doubt we can get Heisenberg alone,” Karl said.
“Circulate, listen, don’t talk,” Moe said. “Everybody likes a nodder who listens. Leave the Gestapo to me.”
Karl recalled Moe’s OSS training and decided to follow orders. He could make out that most of the chat was about the war raging at the western foot of the Alps. Some thick-necked Swiss Army officers spoke with brass on their shoulders and lead in their voices. They had access to news Karl had not heard. The Germans had used even more death dust. The Americans and Brits were flanking around it, in both southern France and the north. So the Germans were using their new jet planes and older fighter-bombers to step up the dust campaign. That meant forcing the Allies into fighting in hilly battlefields, slowing the advance. What about this new bomb the Americans have used—just once? Were there any more?
Karl said nothing. The onrushing new weapons at the climax of this war—V-1s and V-2s, the A-bomb, dust, jet planes—made everyone uncertain, shocked.
He saw von Weizsäcker jesting with some ladies, looking carefree for a man whose country was on the verge of disaster. He decided to avoid the man and went to try the finger food. At a punch bowl, Moe brushed by him and said in a flat tone, “Lay off it. Stay sharp.”
Back to the knots of German speakers, then. He was there only a few moments, listening to tut-tuts about a war that was mostly distant, though exciting, scenery to these people. Karl did see Paul Scherrer amble into the crowd around Heisenberg, then walk off. In a few moments more, Heisenberg made his way out of the crowd and joined Scherrer. They both went over to the Gestapo officer and talked. Then Heisenberg left by a side door, into the back garden on the lake.
The Gestapo watched all this, too. They all held glasses from the punch bowl, plus some of the delicacies from the handsome buffet. As he watched, three of them went back for more punch. Food was in short supply in Deutschland, and this was their holiday.
Moe again swept by, this time with a gesture to Karl to follow, but whispered, “In a minute.”
Karl waited, ignoring the Gestapo, but noticed that Moe took the side door into the garden. He stalled a bit and saw another door, farther away. Once through it, into a vacant sitting room, some glass French doors gave onto the garden. He found Moe admiring the lake view with Heisenberg. Scherrer was not there.
As he walked toward them, Karl could see through the windows the Gestapo smoking, talking, not looking at the garden. Scherrer spoke loudly and seemed to be regaling them with a story. Karl’s nerves were strumming, skin prickly, heart thumping, an odd stinging in his nostrils. I’m way out of my league here.
Heisenberg turned, nodded to Karl, and in accented English said, “I have been waiting for you to appear.”
Karl blinked. “What?!”
“Scherrer told me of you; he is a friend. But I already expected some contact, somehow.”
Moe said sternly, “Does the Gestapo know who we are? Or might be?”
“They suspect everyone. But gentlemen—events nuclear now dominate this dreadful war,” Heisenberg said mildly, his eyes veiled. “We have studied the nuclear debris at the Berlin crater. Uranium, as we expected. I must compliment you gentlemen on completely outdistancing us.”
Moe said, “Your program is not advanced?”
Heisenberg shrugged. “Why conceal it now? After my 1942 conference with Albert Speer, who by then was minister of armaments and war production, he gave us some money. We are building a reactor, a peaceful use.”
“Not separating the 235 from the 238?” Karl asked.
“Separation, we calculated, was too difficult. I and the others, we felt from 1940 onward that any bomb was unlikely before 1942, when army said the war would be over. So Speer concluded that reactor research should proceed.”
Karl said, “What irony! It was fear of a German bomb that led to the invention of our bomb.”
Heisenberg raised an eyebrow. “When the Reich began losing the war, they believed, also around 1942, that these weapons could not be made quickly enough to change the outcome.”
Moe was wary, watching the garden, the party inside. Karl felt an anger building. “Our whole goddamned raison d’être was your lead in nuclear physics!”
“I dismissed from the outset the possibility of producing pure U-235 in significant quantities,” Heisenberg said mildly. “The engineering was beyond us. Also, not until Stalingrad did the Reich use centralized planning and control. So there was little coherence in the nuclear program. It was dispersed among many laboratories, with funding
provided by three separate government agencies. An enormous task. How did you do it?”
“Centrifuges,” Karl said. “Plenty of them.”
“Ah! We did not think they could be so effective.”
“It took a lot of work.”
“So we gathered. However . . .” Heisenberg looked canny, eyes narrowed. “We embarked in 1942, to produce a reactor capable of going into a condition we called ‘fast critical.’ I calculated that a chain reaction would build in a few thousandths of a second.”
Karl shook his head. He could hear the tinny, distant party chatter and wondered how long they had out here. “That could work, give you an explosion of sorts. But it would have been far too heavy, far too feeble, to make a practical weapon. You’d need a compact assembly of pure fissionable isotopes—”
“Move it along,” Moe said.
“Okay, we know the main answer, you have no bombs—but why do you have enough to drop dust?”
“We kept the mines in Czechoslovakia working. Our reactor, partly built, the army took. Now they hold the pitchblende for the Luftwaffe. The radioactives are not near our reactor effort, I can assure you. We had already cleaned the pitchblende of oxides and lead, so it was ready to use for the dust. That fellow of the rockets, von something—”
“Von Braun,” Moe supplied, eyes on the windows.
“Yes, he pushed this dust idea, after Berlin. Speer liked it. As did Hitler.”
“You worked on the dust?”
Heisenberg shook his head. “I had no expertise. In this war, I work through quiet interventions within the bureaucracy, rather than overt public protest. Even that is highly dangerous now. I had hoped that the regime’s most extreme manifestations would not last long. I had hoped that they would make possible a Germany, which could lead Europe to a more orderly future.”
“Wrong about that,” Moe said stiffly.
“Like many comrades in the Jugendbewegung—ah, the Youth Movement of the Weimar era—I was beguiled by romantic nationalism and our supreme German culture. We are the answer to such horrors as the Soviets.” Heisenberg said this earnestly, searching Karl’s face, almost beseeching him.
Karl said, “Look, we want this war over—soon.”
“As do I. Your attempt on Hitler would have done it, I think. It has blown a large hole in the Nazi Party people. Plus the Wehrmacht General Staff.”
Moe brightened at this, glancing at them, then back at the windows. People were moving quickly around in the party; something was happening, but Karl let Moe tend to that.
Karl said carefully, “We have more bombs. We can try again.”
“Three months now and no more bombs. So I do not believe you.”
“You will soon.”
Heisenberg frowned skeptically at this. “Perhaps you have no more.”
“Don’t bet on it.”
Heisenberg said warily, slowly, “Do you know of the Wolfsschanze?”
“No,” Moe said. “I do recall that ‘Wolf’ is a self-adopted nickname of Hitler.”
“There are Führerhauptquartiere—places where he lives. They are heavily guarded by Reichssicherheitsdienst, a special corps of Reich security service. The ‘Wolf’s Lair’ as you would say, it is in the woods about eight kilometers from the small East Prussian town of Rastenburg. He uses it to direct the eastern front. The Soviets are pushing us hard there now. Savage people.”
Moe turned to confront Heisenberg, Karl saw, using his body to intimidate the much smaller man. “What’s it like?”
“A well-concealed bunker, deep. As you have guessed, I was called in to consult on the dust. We flew in at night, to avoid the danger of your air force. A big discussion, it was. Von Braun was there, von Weizsäcker, myself. Hitler was dancing with joy at the idea von Braun brought forward—gotten, they say, from a fiction piece, by an American. I suspect von Braun made it up himself, and the fiction story is a ruse.”
“He didn’t fake that,” Karl said. This Heisenberg seemed smug, and Karl could not resist adding, “We have a reactor too.”
“What?” This brought eye-widening skepticism. “Both a bomb and—”
“Turns out, reactors helped us along some. Fermi built the first one for us.”
Heisenberg’s mouth pinched. “Our bomb work did not have the top priority.” He said this slowly, looking into the distance, not at the house. “I estimated we would need a ton of refined, separated U-235 to make one bomb, perhaps. Apparently I was wrong. Yours must have been smaller than that, to fly it at all.” Another pause. Silence. Karl waited. “So with lesser funds, many of the young scientists von Weizsäcker needed got drafted. This was after Stalingrad. They were sent to the front. Many of them died.”
This digression made Moe’s face tighten. “How is this ‘Wolf’s Lair’ defended?”
Heisenberg hesitated, his puzzlement showing how hard he was barraged by all this news. “I was there just once. It has heavy, colossal structures. Reinforced concrete as defense. Hitler much fears air attack.”
“We can deal with that,” Karl said dryly.
Heisenberg fished in his jacket pocket. “I want you to take back to your superiors my assurance that a surrendered Germany will cooperate to keep the Soviets out of our lands. And also, since you verify that fact, just now—that we in the nuclear program did not invent this dust idea. It was yours.”
“Yeah, we get that,” Moe said sardonically.
“Jawohl. Also, das.” Heisenberg handed Karl a slip of paper, as if shaking hands.
Moe’s eyes widened as he watched the party within. Karl glanced over. People were milling around, flustered. No sign of the Gestapo.
Moe smiled. “Time for us to leave. Please, Herr Doktor Heisenberg, we may need your help to say our good-byes to the hosts.”
As they came into the large party, Karl saw shifting eyes, puzzlement, amid short, rough German sentences he could not follow. Nobody paid them much attention as they worked their way toward the front doorway.
Suddenly the Obergruppenführer came angling in from their left, face flushed, hair mussed up. He spat out some fast German to a woman. It had the tone of something’s-happening-but-I-don’t-know-what. Moe kept walking calmly away, his gait smooth and easy. Karl was glad to follow, trying to look casual. His heart was hammering.
Out the door. No Gestapo guarding it. With that they picked up the pace, moving swiftly through a side garden, around the large house, and out to the dark street.
“What was going on in there?” Karl asked.
“A bit of diarrhea for the Gestapo.”
“Uh, how did—”
“I noticed that they were drinking from one punch bowl near them and got a cup, while adding a touch of my own. The OSS developed it for us.”
“So they’re—”
“Shitting their guts out, for several more hours.”
Karl could not suppress his laugh. Only when they were blocks away, under a streetlight, did Karl open the paper. It read:
54.079344°N 21.493544°E
6.
August 22, 1944
The next morning they rose early and before breakfast went for a bracing walk through the town. Their train was not until ten o’clock and the view was stunning, making Karl regret that they had to leave, to go back into wartime France and out through Marseille. They passed a Konditorei and the cloud of luscious smells from it, and on impulse went in. They ordered confections and coffee in the nearly deserted shop and dug into the warm cream cakes. Moe went through his quickly, got more, and with a big gulp of the aromatic coffee, said, “Nobody has money, so these places just barely survive. Y’know, the profession Konditor developed from bakers, meaning “confectioners,” once the medieval bakers, around the fifteenth century, figured out bread. So some started to rarefy the dough with honey, dried fruit, and spices.”
“Lebküchler,” Moe said, pointing to the establishment sign. “Experts at adding good things to light breads.” This arcane knowledge was usual with Moe, bits of lo
re picked up in his constant reading.
They walked to enjoy the aromas of shops and stalls until Moe whispered, “I was rather concerned last night, the way that obvious SS team were looking at us, asking questions.”
“Me too. I hope our accents held up.”
Moe scowled. “They asked me some nuclear stuff, and I played dumb. Then they switched to S-matrix theory. Baiting me, plainly. I gave some garbled version of Heisenberg’s remarks and broke it off.”
“Well, you did sit in the front row.”
“Yeah, maybe a mistake. Let’s get back. I’m packed.”
“Me too,” Karl said. They hastened along, and when they entered the hotel, the manager came over with anxious eyes.
“Men were here just now, asking for you. German.”
“Polizei? Gestapo?” Karl asked.
“They wore suits, but yes, seemed to be, from what they said. Wanted to know when your train was.”
Moe rumbled, “You told them?”
The manager, a slight man, blinked. “I—I thought I had to—”
“You have a car?” Moe asked.
“Well, yes, but the Bahnhofplatz is only a few hundred meters—”
“They’ll cover the Bahnhofplatz. Here—” Moe handed the man a roll of bills. “Your car— We want to rent it for a few hours.”
Dancing eyes as the manager counted the bills and bit his lip. “I don’t know, I—”
Moe loomed over the manager. “Where is it—and the keys?”
“Down that way—”
Inside five minutes they had their bags in the car. Karl slammed the passenger door and Moe backed them out of the tiny garage. “We don’t dare use the train, right?”
“They probably didn’t want to arrest us at the dinner. This is easier, grab us at the train station, nobody in the physics community knows.”
Traffic slowed them and Moe turned onto a side road, out into the countryside. “We can pick up the big highway once we’re over the hills and down the valley,” Karl said, consulting a map from the glove compartment. His heart thumped as scenery flashed by.
The Berlin Project Page 35
