God's Formula

by James Lepore

  Her breath returning to normal, she listened to MI-6 special agent Ian Fleming making noises in the apartment’s interior, then reviewed what had just happened. First, the long kiss at the railing in the lovely night air, his tongue—firm, gentle, darting, drinking her—then the gun in her ribs, very hard—turn around, Marlene, this is a nine millimeter Navy Beretta. She turned and immediately felt a tugging at her hemline, followed by the sibilant hiss of something cutting her dress open, bottom to top. A razor? Then the ripping and cutting away of everything else, a second’s work. Then—he must have knelt down—the tongue again, darting and licking, as he spread her legs apart, drinking again, his head buried in her flesh. Then him standing, and the stinging pain in her buttocks, whack, and whack again. Then the sex, the thick hard penis, serpent-sized, it seemed, taking her from behind as he pulled her hair and leaned her over the railing, her juices flowing like never before.

  I have been truly fucked, she thought, for the first time.

  She noticed now that the moon was full, that its silver light filtering through the jasmine branches overhead cast a crazy lattice of shadows on her body, which had been flushed but was now being cooled by a very lovely breeze. She was reaching idly for her dress, thinking to drape it over her, when Fleming reappeared carrying Champagne on a silver tray.

  “Don’t,” he said. “I like you like that. The moonlight becomes you.”

  “Ian…”

  “Yes?”

  Marlene Jaeger knew a/k/a’s real identity. She had taken pictures of him via her diamond brooch when he visited her table at Maxim’s. She had read his dossier, and was prepared to be impressed, but not this impressed, not in this way.

  “My dress. How will I get home?”

  “Safety pins, of course, and my dinner jacket, but there are no cabs now anyway. We’ll leave in the morning.”

  “I see,” Marlene replied, letting the dress slip out of her hand and fall to the floor. “What about your friend, Charles? Will he come home?”

  “He’ll stay at the Ritz tonight. No worries. You can scream as loud as you want.”

  Marlene smiled. “So we’re…?”

  “Of course, we’ve just gotten started,” Fleming replied, smiling a broad smile, his burlesque version of wickedness. “But let’s drink first. This is very good Champagne.”

  Chapter 13

  Paris, May 31, 1940, 8:00 p.m.

  “MeinSeelowen, I miss you.”

  “Mein delfin, how are you?”

  “Well.”

  “And your sister?”

  “Terrible. One of her friends was attacked on the street, he’s in hospital.”

  “Goodness, by whom?”

  “We think it was a jealous rival.”

  “How is she taking it?”

  “She and the nanny have become friends.”

  “And your nephews. Any word?”

  “No, we can’t find them.”

  “What is Paris like?”

  “Rumors, everywhere rumors, on everyone’s lips. There are bonfires at Quai d’Orsay.”

  “You must stay safe. The war is not our business.”

  “I will.”

  “If Paris falls, the president of my company will visit.”

  “Shall I try to see him?” she asked. “Pay my regards?”

  “No, he will be too busy.”

  “Very well.”

  “Another time, perhaps.”

  “Of course, my dearest.”

  “Dearest. Auf weiderschein.”

  “Goodbye.”

  Madame Amethyste hung up the phone, stepped out of the cabine de telephone and quickly surveyed the small bar-bistro she had randomly entered to make her call. The same bartender, the same people at the same tables, six in all, except for one newcomer, a man in a shabby suit, with a rough beard, sipping coffee and reading a newspaper at a table near the window. Outside, she walked casually to the corner, turned right, at the next block right again, and then immediately stepped into the alcove entrance to a small hotel. She waited. The man with the rough beard did not appear. To be safe, she entered the hotel, found its rear entrance, and exited.

  On the metro to her Latin Quarter neighborhood, she puzzled over the events of the last few days. Starting with the summons home to speak with Canaris, who told her about the remarkable formula carried by the Friedeman boy, and gave her instructions concerning Himmler’s pet, Marlene Jaeger. She supplies him with young boys, Canaris had said. They are both disgusting. She recalled vividly Canaris’ bitter disappointment when she told him young Friedeman had escaped, a surprising show of emotion for a man who almost never revealed his feelings. And now this, Hitler coming to Paris, and Canaris’ instructions to leave him be. If he gets the formula first, Madamoiselle Amethyste thought, putting the pieces of the puzzle together in her mind’s eye, assassination will not be necessary. He will depose our grotesque “leader” bloodlessly. He who holds the formula for a rapidly made atomic bomb, rules all, including Adolf Hitler, who will be happy to go rather than be handed over to the Prussians, who do not want this war and who hate him.

  She hated the silly code she and Canaris had cooked up for their telephone conversations. Extemporaneous events, like the loss of the SS agent following Fleming, were difficult to articulate. Both she and Jaeger—that is, the Abwehr and the SS—were following him, but Jaeger did not know of the Abwehr’s operation, nor even of Mademoiselle Amethyste’s existence. Quietly, as the train rocked, she composed in her head the coded report she would send to her chief, childhood friend and sometime lover, Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, via airplane, the same one that brought her to Berlin and back yesterday.

  MI-6 agent Ian Fleming romancing Marlene Jaeger. Fleming has disabled a member of Jaeger ’ s cell, who was tailing him. Fleming has made no other contacts. I will continue to watch him and Jaeger. I will bring you the formula.

  Chapter 14

  Paris, June 1, 1940, Noon

  “Hello.”

  “Herr Reichsfuhrer.”

  “Speak.”

  “Fleming has not returned to the school.”

  “Contacts?”

  “None.”

  “What has he been doing?”

  “Sightseeing. Reading the newspapers at cafes.”

  “And you deduce what, exactly?”

  “The boys have left the school. He does not know where, but believes they are in Paris. He must have a colleague, several perhaps, who are looking for them.”

  Chapter 15

  Paris, June 3, 1940, 1:00 p.m.

  “You think I’m stupid?” Conrad Friedeman asked.

  “Far from it,” was Karl Brauer’s answer.

  “I’m not,” Conrad said.

  “Of course…”

  “This formula? They are mad. I have no formula.”

  “They think you’ve hidden it someplace.”

  “Madness.”

  “Conrad…”

  “There must be a munitions plant nearby.”

  “Conrad…”

  The two boys were sitting against a sweating stone wall in the dank and musty cellar of a four-story apartment building. When the air raid siren had gone off, they were hustled out of the third floor apartment they were staying in. On the way down, they heard antiaircraft fire and a loud, guttural hum high overhead. Conrad had tried to open a window in one of the landings to look out, but he had been yanked back by the bearded Monsieur Boule, one of their watchers. They were the only ones in the cellar. Boule had locked them in. Now Conrad was going on in the way he did sometimes, but today he seemed more agitated.

  “We will win the war, Karl,” said Conrad, “have no doubt.”

  “Those are phony broadcasts from Berlin you have been listening to,” Karl replied. “Goebbels’ doing. You must know that. The French are not defeatists.”

  “They are cynical,” Conrad replied. “The unions, the oligarchs, the politicians, the church. Everyone out for themselves. There is no honor here, no principles worth fight
ing for.”

  “Why do you persist in this, Conrad? You will be killed if you fall into German hands. To them, you are a traitor, carrying the formula for a super weapon to the enemy. Do you understand what that means?”

  “The unions will still work no more than a forty hour week. Can you believe it, with the Wehrmacht a hundred miles from Paris?” Conrad’s dark brown eyes had a hard glitter to them now.

  “Rubbish. Propaganda from Goebbels.”

  “We will…” Before Conrad could finish his sentence, there was a loud boom overhead, followed by a shaking of the ceiling above them and the crashing down of one of the ancient wooden beams holding it in place.

  It was not a munitions factory that was nearby, that seemed obvious. Staring at the rubble, dazed, covered with dust, but miraculously unhurt, Conrad could see a name etched on a stone lintel, now on the sidewalk, that had obviously just a few minutes ago hung over the building’s front door. L’Ecole Vincent Van Gogh. The decadent painter, he thought, starting to come back to his senses. Some papers flapped at his feet. He looked down and saw several colorful crayon drawings, a crude tree and house in one, a stick family in another. Devoirs was written across the top of a third, a picture of an apple. Then something in the rubble caught his eye. A movement. Scanning, he realized that the front half of the one-story school building had been demolished. He shielded his eyes with his right hand. The day was beautiful. It is spring, he thought, apropos of nothing. Then he saw the movement again, moved closer and looked down to see a bloody arm and a crushed head—a small, bloody head—with silky brown hair splayed behind it, as if it was resting on a cushion. The arm moved again, a twitching movement. He stared at it. Then, when it did not twitch again, he cleared some of the rubble from the body—a child’s body—which, except for the bloody head and arm, was completely intact and unscathed, its legs splayed slightly, its white and yellow dress pretty in the golden sunlight, its small feet still in its white socks and canvas shoes.

  Conrad stared at this body for a second and then heard a siren in the distance, the insistent high-low, high-low, high-low of a Parisian ambulance or police car. He listened to this jarring sound intently for a few seconds as it drew closer and louder, unable to stop it from entering his head through his ears, which seemed to be as large as megaphones. There were people nearby speaking and gesturing. Had he said something? Everything, except the sound of the siren, seemed to be on the other side of a pane of glass, or was it all under water? Then there was that familiar taste in his mouth and the debris-strewn sidewalk seemed to rise up toward him, but before it reached him, a large bearded man took hold of his arm.

  Chapter 16

  Paris, June 9, 1940, 10:00 a.m.

  “Can I fill up with petro while I’m here?” asked Father Alain LaToure.

  “You may be thought cheeky,” John Tolkien replied.

  “Sheekee?”

  “Effronte.”

  “Effronte? You’re joking, of course.”

  “I’m afraid not.”

  Father Alain, in his black soutane, looked around. The cobblestoned rear courtyard of His Britannic Majesty’s Embassy in France was eerily quiet. The two young men he had brought with him, both strapping, moving lithely in the bright morning sunlight, were making quick work of loading the thirty-odd cases of Thompson submachine guns and ammunition into the back of the Sion Convent’s Citroen Camionette. The sagging open-air truck, marketed in the mid-twenties to small farmers in rural France—donated to the good sisters when it was on its last legs in 1938—sagged even more under the weight of its heavy load.

  “Your vaunted BEF has left,” Father Alain said. “Your embassy is filled with ghosts, and you think it bold of me to ask for fuel? We are staying to fight the Bosche, while you flee.”

  “I’m staying.”

  “So you say.”

  “Here comes Captain Smythe,” said Tolkien. “We can ask.”

  Captain Smythe, the same ruddy-faced captain who had greeted Tolkien and Fleming on the day nine months ago when they had reported that the Friedeman boy had not appeared at Gare de l’Est, now sans mustache, looking determined but haggard—his face was shockingly unshaven—reached them and nodded.

  “All set, then?” he said.

  “Almost,” Father Alain replied. “May I inquire?”

  “Yes?”

  “I need petrol.”

  “Ah, yes,” Smythe replied. “There’s a pump around back, and a shed with gerry cans. Take as much as you like.”

  “You don’t think I’m sheekee?”

  “Sheekee?”

  “Impertinent.”

  “No, sorry if you’ve been given that impression. I’m staying as well. In fact, we should talk.”

  “I will fill up and then come back for more fuel. Will you be here?”

  “For a day or two.”

  Father Alain did not answer as all three men looked up, in the direction of the sound of German bombers high in the eastern sky. Overlaid on this now familiar hum came the high-pitched, siren-like whine of the Stuka, the Luftwaffe’s terrifying dive bomber. The whine, which grew louder as the plane dove at a forty-five degree angle, was faint to them, but distinct. They could see the plane now in the distance, diving to within two hundred feet of the earth before releasing its bombs. Then the muffled thuds of the bombs exploding. They watched the resulting smoke and dust clouds rise into the atmosphere, marring an otherwise clear blue sky, then turned back to the business at hand. Nothing to see, really, just the war.

  “Are you the intelligence officer here?” the priest asked.

  “The last one left.”

  “Where are the Bosche?”

  “Rommel is fast approaching the Seine. The Luftwaffe is running riot. British and French air…”

  “Yes?”

  “They no longer exist.”

  “How long?”

  “Three days, four at the most.”

  “I’ll come back later today for more petrol. We’ll talk then.”

  “Excellent. I… I lost two brothers up near Reims.”

  Smythe looked to the side for a quick second, as if embarrassed by this personal revelation, or perhaps he was looking in what he thought was the direction of Reims. Then he saluted smartly before turning and heading toward the rear of the embassy.

  “I apologize,” Tolkien said.

  “No need.”

  “Yes, I—”

  “No. I keep insulting the English, but it is my anger that is talking. Much British blood has been shed in defense of France, and there will be more. It is humiliating that we have let this happen.”

  “You are not the typical parish priest, I must say.”

  “I am deeply flawed.”

  “We all are,” said the Englishman, “hence the need for salvation.”

  “That perspective, professor, will soon be lost forever.”

  “I hope not.”

  The two men, roughly the same age, looked at each other for a moment and then looked quickly away, the way men do. The skies were empty and silent now, but both men knew that the death machines would be back.

  “I have seen you at mass every day, professor.”

  The Englishman nodded.

  “The world presses itself on us regardless, n’est pas?” the priest said.

  Tolkien smiled a wry smile.

  “We must embrace it, I think,” the priest said. “Each in our own way.”

  “Speaking of embracing it,” Tolkien replied, “I must ask, Father, I have been to the Café de la Petit Flore every day…”

  “Your boys are safe, professor,” said the priest.

  “Can we have them now?”

  “No.”

  “Father…”

  “One of them is sick. A doctor has visited.”

  “Friedeman?”

  “Yes. Epilepsy.”

  “Epilepsy?”

  “He escaped and was seen speaking German at the scene of a bombing.”

  “Is he safe?”
/>
  “Yes, he was found just in time. A crowd was gathering.”

  “Surely he was not considered dangerous. He is a boy.”

  “It was a primary school, professor. Children were lying dead in the rubble. The people left in Paris…, well, they are frightened. They feel abandoned. The Bosche are in Evreux today. There are rumors that their spies precede them. Perhaps the boy is one of them, they think, a spy. They put nothing past the Bosche. Will their women be raped, their children taken away to camps? Bedlam.”

  “Shall I continue to visit the café?”

  “Yes, but there is no formula.”

  “Father…” Tolkien stopped himself. He was not in the habit of challenging priests. At the age of eighteen, deeply in love with Edith, he had obeyed the command of his legal guardian, a kindly but no-nonsense priest, not to see or communicate with her until he became twenty-one, the age at which the guardianship terminated. He had suffered dearly for his obedience, but things had worked out well. So well, that he and Edith named their first son John, after Father Morgan.

  “Yes, professor?”

  “What about Captain Smythe? The embassy must surely be able to tell you who I am.”

  “It is not up to me to confirm who you are, it is up to the people in la resistance. Their one contact with your MI-6 has disappeared. He was an actor at the Comedie Francaise, probably killed by Abwehr agents. They are waiting for a replacement to be identified. An understudy I suppose you could say. Until then, the boys are safe.”

  “Once the Germans arrive, I will have to go into hiding.”

  “Make your way to my rectory. I will conceal you there.”

  Father Alain’s two young men were tying a tarp over the wooden crates of guns and ammo. When they finished, they stood at the rear of the truck and lit cigarettes.