by John Lawton
Rod’s mother, Lady Troy, asked if he would play for her. Rosen had been expecting this and at idle moments had quietly worked out what he would play. He had a recollection of Rod telling him months ago that his mother had studied with Debussy.
She showed him into a room of powdery red walls, heavy red curtains, deeply upholstered red furniture—and a full Steinway grand piano. The rest traipsed in behind him, still pissed and giggly, but the first thing any pianist learns is how to shut an audience up with a look.
He played Estampes, music so liquid it all but puddled at his feet: Pagodes, La Soirée dans Grenade, Jardins sous la pluie. When he had finished, in the hiatus when he knew he had finished but his audience wasn’t quite sure, he looked at Sergeant Troy and was almost certain he had fallen asleep. But his eyes opened, his hands met, and he led a soft round of applause.
An old man who had not been in the room when he first sat down came up and shook his hand.
“Alex Troy, paterfamilias. So glad I arrived home in time.”
And he was gone before Rosen could say more.
Young Troy struggled to his feet.
“Are you okay?” Rosen asked.
“Bit of a bang on the head. Occupational hazard.”
“You get hit often?”
“I suppose I do. But in this case it was a Luftwaffe high explosive. Brought the building down on my head and, in the matter of one small piece of masonry, I mean that literally.”
He stumbled, Rosen caught him and sat him on the piano stool. He looked around for assistance but they were alone in the room now.
“I’ll be fine,” Troy said. “As I was saying, occupational hazard.”
He shook himself, suddenly snapping into alertness.
Rosen probed gently.
“Your brother tells me you are no mean pianist yourself?”
“He flatters me. I was keen before I joined the force, but from then until this summer I lived without a piano in the house. I bought myself a Bösendorfer in June.”
“And now you play again?”
“It was . . . an optimistic move. I play but . . .”
“Play for me now.”
“Honestly, I couldn’t.”
“Please. In Berlin I had pupils, in Vienna I had pupils. Since I got to England there have been none. It was always a pleasure and a stimulus to me to work with pupils. I had a girl cellist who could move a stone statue to tears.”
“Okay,” said Troy. “But I warn you, London brick does not weep at the sound of my fingers on ivory.”
He played Rosen a couple of minutes from the middle section of Ravel’s Gaspard de la nuit, based on poems by some bloke whose name he’d forgotten—the only bit that was not punctuated by staccato, bone-tingling percussives. It was a bit wet, a bit Frenchy, a bit dreamy—but if Rosen liked Estampes he might well like this. And it had a good left hand. Troy liked a good left hand. He was left-handed. Ravel had even written a full-length concerto, left hand only, for some bloke, whose name he’d forgotten, who’d lost his right arm in the last war.
“You have talent,” Rosen said when he had finished.
What else can one say to that but “thank you”?
“You practice every day?”
“No,” said Troy. “I’m lazy that way.”
“Then try to be less lazy some other way. Give a good talent a sporting chance. And come to me for lessons.”
“Okay,” said Troy. “I will.”
But he didn’t.
§27
Toronto: November 1940
Six weeks after their first meeting, Ron Katzenbach drove out to the camp and collected Szabo. He installed him in what the English would have called “digs.” A room in a private home on Albany Street, a block south of Bloor, with a Scottish landlady who was dusting flour from hand to apron as she greeted him.
Leaving, Katzenbach said, “Get out and about. See something of the town. Just check in with the cops every Thursday morning.”
“And if I make a run for it?”
“I can’t think why you’d want to . . . But Mrs. Macleod will shoot you. Don’t let cookies and clean sheets take you in. She works for Uncle Sam as surely as I do.”
Szabo didn’t doubt it.
He lodged with Mrs. Macleod for three months, ate everything she put in front of him, listened to her pining for the old country, and wondered where she hid her pistol.
On the coldest of winter nights—Toronto locked into a merciless iron snowball—she would serve him haggis and a nip. Haggis turned out not to be so baffling as the word suggested and with its minced offal boiled in a sheep’s stomach it resembled in taste and sheer portability the kokoretsi he had been accustomed to in Hungary. A delicacy of both comfort and convenience. A nip turned out to be three fingers of scotch in a tumbler—and as he tuned out to Mrs. Macleod’s Highland musings, he wondered if he would be a refugee forever, always thinking of food before anything else, and whether the life of the mind would ever be restored to its rightful place ahead of the life of the belly. He was warm and well fed, but his mind was numb.
O, Canada.
Towards the end of February, Katzenbach showed up again. Another of Uncle Sam’s nephews in tow. An utterly different kind of nephew. This one seemed scarcely to fill his suit. A lean, bright-eyed young man, about Szabo’s own age, with a cold, bony handshake.
“Dr. Szabo, I’m Ed Donnelly.”
Szabo gripped the hand a moment too long, and Donnelly responded by leaning in toward him as though anticipating a shared confidence.
“Are we building an atomic bomb, Mr. Donnelly?”
Szabo let go. Donnelly drew back sharply but he was smiling as he opened his briefcase and slid papers out onto Mrs. Macleod’s burnished dining table.
“You’ll have to forgive me, Dr. Szabo, but I must answer a question with a question. Is Germany building an atomic bomb?”
Katzenbach stepped in.
“Why don’t we all sit down?”
It bought the two of them a heartbeat and more.
“I haven’t been in Germany in a long time,” Szabo said.
“But you lived there? You worked there?”
“Yes, for almost four years. But I left when Hitler came to power in 1933.”
“At the same time as Edward Teller and Leo Szilard?”
The mention of names was resonant. Another piece of the picture spun through space and time and fell into place. He’d worked with both in Berlin. He couldn’t abide Teller. Almost exactly the same age as himself, quite possibly a genius, but prone to infighting and rivalry—a limping little toad as Szabo had quickly come to think of him. Szilard was ten years older, a friend and a mentor. The physicist’s physicist.
“Yes,” he said. “On the same day; in fact, the same train as Leo Szilard.”
“But . . . you’re not Jewish.”
“I don’t think one has to be Jewish to recognize the threat. Leo and I saw eye to eye on that. Germany was hell bent on dominating Europe. It was time to leave. I could not go home, after what I’d seen in my youth . . . Budapest switching from empire to soviet to fascist in a matter of weeks, and so little to tell the one from the other. I spent six months in Vienna. I never thought Austria would be much of an obstacle to Nazism, but it took those six months for me to realize they’d probably collaborate with it. Then, two years in Paris . . . on to England . . . a story you surely know by now.”
“Dominate Europe?”
“Yes.”
“So . . . is Germany building an atomic bomb?”
He wasn’t sure where Teller was now, but Szilard had been at Columbia University, in New York, since 1938. This, whatever it was, was Leo’s doing.
“Why don’t you ask Leo?”
“I did. He said to ask you.”
It finally broke the ice. Szabo smiled, Donnelly laughed, and the infection spread. Katzenbach laughed without quite knowing what he was laughing at.
“Yes, Mr. Donnelly. Germany is building an atomic b
omb. Most Western countries have the know-how, as you might put it . . . and Hitler loves his toys . . . they’ve had access to ample supplies of radium since they took the Sudentenland and they banned the export of uranium a while back. I think that’s all the evidence you need . . . but . . .”
“But?”
“It won’t work.”
“How come?”
“A lack of talent . . . perhaps a lack of will.”
“Really? From here it looks like they have both, in spades.”
“They have Heisenberg. They could have had Teller, Szilard, and a dozen others, but Teller and Szilard are here.”
“And so are you.”
“And so am I. Somewhat reluctantly.”
“So . . . why won’t it work?”
“When I say will I might better say resources, or perhaps focus. There might be an incompatibility of aims. Perhaps winning the war is incompatible with the chosen goal.”
“Which is?”
“To kill the Jews.”
“And killing Jews is what . . . a kind of false focus . . . a drain on resources?”
“Both of those and more. It is a factory of death when they should be building a factory of . . . of atoms.”
“Factory of death. That’s a metaphor, right? You don’t actually think they’re industrializing the killing of Jews?”
“I say again. I left Germany in 1933. At that time the Nazis seemed to think that physics itself was some form of Jewish black magic. I don’t know what they’re up to. I simply know of what they are capable.”
Donnelly mused on this a moment, turning a rubber-tipped pencil end over end on the tabletop.
“That’s really politics. So, tell me straight. Tell me as a scientist. Why won’t it work?”
“Heisenberg’s ideas will prevail in Germany. He is wedded to the use of tritium. They will obtain this from deuterium reactions. But the ratio of tritium to deuterium is very low. Germany will waste time and money trying to produce large quantities of heavy water, as a neutron moderator and, hence, a source of small quantities of tritium. I cannot say it will be useless to them. But it is the long way ’round. And we should not concern ourselves with it. Building heavy water reactors would be an . . . an indulgence. An indulgence the Germans have not even begun—they seem to be relying on a conquered Norway to supply their heavy water. The bomb that will work most readily is uranium-235 triggered by more uranium-235. That, too, is scarce and needs to be isolated from uranium-238 at a ratio of greater than one hundred to one. There are several ways we could do this—chemical diffusion, electromagnetic separation, and at a pinch, thermal diffusion. None of them easy. But if we start now . . . and when we need neutron moderation, the process can be moderated by pure graphite or at least as pure as we can make it—that’s free from boron. We can get around to the tritium later. Right now we need about six or seven kilos of pure uranium isotope. And I’m sorry to have lectured you.”
“Six or seven kilos? That’s a lot less than many of your colleagues are saying.”
“A little more than fourteen pounds, in two unequal portions, brought together with sufficient impact.”
“You mean just slam the two together? Hit one chunk of uranium with another chunk?”
Donnelly gently punched the fist of his right hand into the open palm of his left, like a baseball catcher with a mitt.
“If you like,” Szabo said.
“As Old World as an ironclad firing a cannonball.”
“Not quite, but a pleasing simile.”
Donnelly spread the papers out in a fan in front of him. Szabo recognized the familiar buff covers, the hand-cut octavo paper with its tactile ragged edges. His last paper at Cambridge, mailed off that day in 1939 when he was interned—and there were even a couple he’d written for Die Naturwissenschaften and Zeitschrift für Physik when he was scarcely out of his teens.
“I read a couple of your papers.”
Of course he had; for all his diffidence this man was a pro. Not a practicing physicist, but a keen observer.
“The paper on heavy water seems almost personal, as though you had it in for Heisenberg?”
The truth would be such a long answer, so Szabo shrugged the question off with a white lie.
“Not so, I hardly know the man.”
“And the paper on uranium-235 and particle collision is impressive but somewhat inconclusive.”
“Inconclusive?”
“I thought you . . . kinda pulled your punches at the end.”
“By which you mean I did not assert what I did not know to be true.”
“Stick your neck out, Dr. Szabo. You’re among friends here. And besides, Ron doesn’t understand a damn thing, do you, Ron?”
Ron was mid lighting up a cigarette and froze with the flame on his lighter hovering at the end of his Camel.
“Understand? Hell, I wasn’t even listening.”
Szabo said, slowly, almost pedantically, “The absorption of additional neutrons by uranium-235, under particle bombardment, will lead us into unknown areas. You might say that that’s what physics does. Neutron absorption has been an accepted notion since Enrico Fermi first proved radiative capture about five years ago. It’s the key to the next unknown. At the time I was writing, the product of such experiments as Fermi’s tended to be regarded as isotopes of uranium or mistaken for lighter elements, and the possibility of a chain reaction was something even Leo Szilard, its earliest proponent, referred to as ‘moonshine.’ Until January 1939, no one was certain that nuclear fission was possible—the term itself did not exist. I was trying to state, perhaps too cautiously for clarity, my conviction that there were—or would be—distinct transuranic elements, products of fission, and to point out where this was leading. I was not the first to suggest this and I gather while I’ve been interned—after all, the people censoring my mail tend not to censor what they cannot understand—that there has been proof, a new element: atomic number 93, named neptunium, discovered only last year. But it’s unstable. The beta decay is very rapid—the half-life not much more than two days. I was theorizing something much more dramatic. Something of enormous power—with the potential for fission in a sustained chain reaction. And if I’m right . . . in a sense, it’ll take us back to the creation. Moonshine or not, there’ll be something new under the sun.”
“Such as?”
Szabo was reluctant to cross every T and dot every I but did.
“Another new element, with properties unseen in nature. Beyond uranium. Something man has synthesized. Something highly radioactive. Not an isotope of any known element. A new addition to the periodic table.”
“And highly fissile?”
“That, too.”
“More so than uranium-235?”
“Yes.”
“A bigger bang for your buck?”
“The buck is yours, not mine, Mr. Donnelly, but yes, a much bigger bang.”
“I thought that was what you meant.”
Donnelly stood, swept Szabo’s published papers back into his briefcase.
“It was a pleasure meeting you, doctor. Ron will be making arrangements to move you to New York shortly.”
The bony handshake once more. This time it was Donnelly who held on a moment too long and said, sotto voce, “You were right, by the way.”
He was halfway out of the door before Szabo could say, “You mean they’ve found it? The new element?”
Donnelly turned, tugging on the brim of his hat.
“Yep.”
“If it’s not a secret . . . who?”
“It is a secret, but it was Glenn Seaborg at Berkeley.”
It was a silly question, a trivial question of no importance to science, but he had to ask, “What did Seaborg call it?”
“He hasn’t yet. You care to take a crack at it?”
“That would be presumptuous.”
“Nah . . . if the British hadn’t locked you up . . . who knows, it coulda been you.”
Indeed it could.
And he doubted anyone would name an element seaborgium.
“After uranium and neptunium, plutonium would seem rather obvious.”
“Until we run out of planets? Plutonium. I’ll pass it on.”
§28
Katzenbach put him on a train to New York.
“You’ll be met at Penn station.”
“How will I know them?”
“They’ll know you.”
As the train pulled away, Szabo stood in the window. Katzenbach cupped his hands and yelled, “All that genius and you name the fucking thing after Mickey Mouse’s dog!”
So, he had been listening after all.
§29
New York: January 1941
It had been an uncomfortable ten-hour journey across New York state to turn sharply down the Hudson Valley. He could picture it better. October or November, at leaf fall or spring. Niagara had been a distant roar and a miasmic spray. January had rendered most of Upstate New York, the river plain between the Catskills and the Adirondacks, featureless. And the evening mist had turned the Hudson Valley into a grey blur. He could see himself taking the trip for pleasure one day, if only to compensate for there having been none this time.
Penn Station was wonderful. British railway stations tended to have all the divine madness of Piranesi hammered out in steel and meandering off into nowhere, labyrinths of footbridges and walkways in the sky, as chaotic as their cities. This was neoclassic steel, an intricate, ordered latticework supporting arches, domes, and vaults—the old forms of masonry freely interpreted by the seemingly fragile elements of what had so recently been a new technology. It was like watching time bend. The railway passenger in him moved forward; the scientist in him looked up in awe, turned upon his heels and walked backwards bumping into people unapologetically—until one them didn’t move grudgingly out of his way and dynamic physics’s corniest law came into play . . . the old immoveable object.
He had been expecting Leo Szilard.
This wasn’t Leo Szilard.
For one thing she was too tall, for another too beautiful, and for a third she was she.
