The Bell and the Blade, page 55
“Always a pleasure, Madame Aubel,” Dory said to Hélène, like he was about to sell her a Monet forgery. “If I’d known it was going to be a celebration, I would have brought my clarinet.”
At dinner he talked nonstop, saying the wrong things, as always. “To new beginnings,” he said, raising his glass, smiling too wide. “Though we all know how those tend to end in wartime,” he added, prompting a chorus of groans and glares. He had gained weight. When every morsel of food was rationed, Dory had somehow managed to fatten up. Why was Charlie not surprised?
“You’re looking healthy, Dory,” she said. “Flourishing under the occupation?”
“Better than most,” he said, pouring another glass. “To victory!” He tossed back his Slivovitz. Everyone else just muttered, unsure what he even meant. Before the silence settled, he poured himself another. “To love in wartime, ain’t that a thing,” he said, smiling into his drink. “Never enough time to ask who else was in line.” He took a sip.
“All right, Dory, sit down and pipe down,” Fitz said. “Anyone else for a toast?”
No one else spoke up.
“You know what they say,” Dory said. “True love always finds a way.” He raised another glass. “Especially when it’s just come off someone else’s path.”
Charlie and Fitz caught up quietly about their parents in Eindhoven and what Fitz and the others had been up to. He spent most of his time disarming charges the Germans had planted on Antwerp’s cranes. Mireille was back to photographing bridges. Hildi was cutting telephone lines and spiking engines, sabotaging the infrastructure.
Meanwhile, Dory was busy sabotaging Fletcher and Rafael. “What could you boys possibly be up to these days,” he asked, “that you can’t help our girls out with a few things? They helped you.” After draining the last of his drink, Dory finally went quiet. “Time to get going, Fitz,” he slurred into his empty glass.
“You can’t leave yet!” said Hélène, jumping up. “We haven’t had cake.”
While she went to fetch it, Fitz asked to speak to Louise alone. They walked down the yard, under the trees.
“I don’t understand,” said Fitz. “What do you mean you married him?”
Louise looked at Fitz, standing across from her in the long evening light, the garden shadows catching half his face. His curls needed cutting, and the scruff along his jaw needed trimming. He always looked like he hadn’t meant to grow a beard, he just forgot to look in the mirror, and it happened. To catch his gaze was the hardest part for her. His eyes, bright, sea-glass blue and full of things he could never say. The expression in them—wary, weary, bruised—made him seem older than he was, and younger, too. He looked as if he hadn’t quite given up all hope, even though he should have.
“We did it for the war,” Louise said. “We had to do it.”
“When we broke up, you told me it was because you didn’t want to be with anybody,” Fitz said. “War and all that.”
“That was true,” she said. “War. And all that. What do you want me to say, Fitz?”
“Why’d you do it, Lou?—Dory! Leave me alone for a second,” he said loudly to Dorian, who was skulking in the nearby bushes, feigning a sudden interest in weeding.
“I was just helping Madame Aubel with her—”
“Go help her somewhere else.”
“We really need to be going, Fitz—curfew . . .”
“Five minutes, Dory!” Fitz turned to Louise. “You were about to tell me why you married another man,” he said, his voice barely composed.
“We had nowhere to go,” Louise said. “They were wounded. They needed medical attention and rest. You know we couldn’t just barge in, the four of us, and stay with my mother. But now, I don’t know. She looks almost happy.” With deep fondness, Louise gazed at her mother on the patio, raising another glass with Rafael and Fletcher. “Look what a feast she’s put on.” It had been a long time since her mother entertained.
“So, did you marry him because you had to save yourselves . . .”
Louise waited. “Is there an or after that?”
“Or,” Fitz continued, “did you marry him because you loved him?”
Louise felt such affection, such pity, such empathy for Fitz, a boy whom she’d known half her life. If Charlie was like her sister, Fitz was like her brother. Perhaps that’s what was wrong with them as a couple. How did Fitz not see it? She thought long and hard about how to answer him. She didn’t want to hurt him with the truth. And she didn’t want him to hate her.
So, as always, to spare his feelings, Louise decided to lie.
But then Fitz spoke. “I really believed after this was all over, you’d come back to me,” he said in a gutted voice.
Louise couldn’t look up. Charlie kept telling her to be better. Don’t dangle him on a string, Lou, she’d tell her. You’re not being considerate. You’re being selfish. Let him hate you, but free him. Free him to find someone else.
Louise wanted to throw up her hands. All their lives hung in the balance! Fletcher was concocting plans to invade Germany! Yet other things mattered to Fitz—even while he himself was risking his life climbing cranes, removing charges. Even when it seemed nothing else should matter. The personal still mattered the most.
“For once in your life, Lou,” he said, “just give me a true answer. Not one of your embellishments or equivocations. The whole truth. Can you do that?”
“Fitz,” said Louise, “I married him because I love him. To save him, yes, to protect him, yes. But mostly because I love him.”
“You once said you loved me,” said Fitz, his voice cracking.
She took a breath. “Not like him. I’m sorry.”
“Never? Not even when . . .”
“Never. Not even then.”
Fitz didn’t say another word.
84
AMBASSADOR FOR ENRICHMENT
“THIS GRUNFELL GUY IS the only man alive who can enrich uranium fast enough using a cyclotron. No one else has the knowledge, the instinct, and the sheer will to pull it off. With him, we might actually have a working atomic bomb. Without him, we’re set back years.
“If he wants to eat Caspian caviar four times a day and drink tea from China? You’re going to send a man to Persia and Shanghai to get it done.
“He needs thirty workers to regulate the cyclotron? You give him sixty. The machine cannot stop for a single second. It doesn’t stop until the bomb is built.”
These were Himmler’s exact words. Rheinhardt repeated them to Grunfell during his near-daily visits to Zvart Haus.
A day later, Himmler called Grunfell directly to thank him. Grunfell—flattered that a man like Himmler, widely known to be a Jew hater, took such a personal interest in his work—told him he might beat the deadline. “Perhaps I can do it in thirteen weeks,” he said.
The next day, Rheinhardt arrived with a new message. Himmler wanted two bombs instead of one.
“Not three?” Grunfell said dryly. It took Rheinhardt a moment to realize Saul wasn’t being serious.
“He wants you to split the uranium between two devices. Make two smaller ones, instead of one large one.”
“Oh—you’re not joking.”
“He says it will be more tactically flexible,” Rheinhardt said. “Do you want to discuss it with him?”
“Every second I spend up here on the telephone and not calibrating the cyclotron,” said Saul, “costs us another gram of product. The machine downstairs doesn’t run without me—and up here, I count on you to be my ambassador for enrichment.”
“I can’t explain it to him.” Rheinhardt was fed up with being the go-between. Most of his day was now spent on the telephone.
“Next time, I’ll make flyers and pass them out,” Saul muttered. “I’m tired of repeating the basic facts. Get him on the line.” He was barking now—not just at Rheinhardt, but at Himmler himself, the Reichsführer, second only to Hitler. “Herr Himmler,” Saul said, when the line connected, “I heard about your request.”
“We need them, Grunfell,” Himmler said. “No ifs, ands, or buts about it. We’re getting bogged down in France.”
“It’s not a question of need, sir. It’s a question of critical mass.” Saul spoke painfully slowly. “That is—the absolute minimum amount of enriched nuclear fuel required to sustain a chain reaction to cause the bomb to explode. That amount is fifty kilos. Any less, and all you have is an expensive puff of radioactive dust.” He jabbed a finger into the air. “You want to split one bomb into two? Fine. But you won’t get two smaller bangs. You’ll get nothing. You won’t get fire. You’ll get silence. Without critical mass, the chain reaction dies before it begins.”
“How do you know that?” Himmler said. “No one’s made an atomic bomb before. How can you know how much you need?”
“It’s physics, Herr Himmler,” Grunfell said. “Simple elemental physics.”
When he hung up, he turned to Rheinhardt. “What happened to my Caspian caviar? Suddenly it’s one demand after another.”
The next afternoon Rheinhardt was back. “It’s driving me crazy, too, Saul,” he said, as if they were partners in crime. “You think I want to be coming here every afternoon? But I’m under orders, and you’re not picking up your telephone.”
“I’m not answering the telephone because I have work to do,” Grunfell said. “Don’t Krieger and Himmler have a war to put on? A battle to win? A tank to build?”
“They want to know if they should take your depleted uranium to Haigerloch to make plutonium there. They want to make a plutonium bomb.”
“They’re welcome to it,” said Grunfell, with a derisive smirk. “Aside from other considerations, they’ll need four to six months to process and extract the six kilos of plutonium required for such a bomb.”
“What other considerations?”
“The Grunfell consideration,” said Saul. “There are no free neutrons left in my depleted uranium to make plutonium. Remember my formula? I’ve squeezed every last U-235 ion from every batch that feeds and refeeds through the cyclotron.” He shook his head. “But Rheinhardt, even if I hadn’t—and even if they had the time and the heavy water in Haigerloch—what they don’t have is an implosion bomb housing for this non-existent plutonium. I know I can’t build it. I don’t know anyone in the world who can. Perhaps the Americans? Maybe there’s someone in the US Herr Himmler can call and ask? No? I didn’t think so. So, there you have it. Scrape the plates, ion by ion, for fourteen arduous weeks, and then have a nuclear bomb—or have nothing. Quite a jam, isn’t it?”
“He wants to know how close you are,” said Rheinhardt, defeated and out of argument. He was depleted himself, like Grunfell’s uranium, every ion of energy squeezed out of him.
“It’s been four weeks!” said Grunfell. “I’m not getting any closer while I’m up here talking to you about fucking plutonium, that’s for sure.”
Late the next morning, Rheinhardt was back, trudging up the stairs. This time he came at eleven, just before lunch.
“You’re wearing out your welcome, Rheinhardt,” Saul said.
“Krieger wants to know if you need help.”
“Did you tell him no?”
“He says maybe if you had help, the enrichment would go faster.”
“The cyclotron cannot run any longer than twenty-four hours a day,” said Grunfell. “That is its absolute limit.”
“He meant . . .”
“I have all the help I need.”
“He doesn’t mean hands, Grunfell,” Rheinhardt said. “He means another scientist. He’s got a physicist at Haigerloch. Karl Wirtz. Real sharp, he says.”
“I’m at peak capacity.”
“Another pair of eyes might be useful. He could look over the formula. Be in charge of the poison room.”
“I’m. At. Peak. Capacity. It’s a matter of science, Rheinhardt. Not another scientist.”
“Wirtz couldn’t hurt, could he?”
Grunfell stared at Rheinhardt. “I tell you what,” he said, his voice low. “Before you bring him, let me tweak my formula, see if I can increase my yield. Give me a couple of days.”
Rheinhardt was silent.
“Why the sudden rush?” Saul asked. “What’s happening? I thought the Germans were doing all right in France?”
“Probably less well than we’d like.” A beat. “It’s only because you’re doing the impossible, Saul,” Rheinhardt said quietly, almost apologetically. “Seeing the impossible being achieved makes people believe anything’s possible.”
85
FISHING WITH MAURICE
“THEY WANT TO BRING in someone else to help me,” Saul blurted to Louise, when she brought him lunch in the early afternoon and asked breezily how he was.
“Help you do what?” She smiled. “Write in your notebooks?”
“Exactly right, my dear girl. They think if I have one more physicist here with me, I’ll write faster.”
“Won’t you?” she said. “Two people can definitely paint a room faster than one.”
“What if one of them doesn’t speak French?”
“You dip the paintbrush in the bucket and—swish, swish,” said Louise. “Who needs French?”
“The paint has to be prepared,” said Saul. “And only I know how to do it. The paint needs to be chemically calibrated. The impurities need to be removed. And when the temperature is slightly too hot or too cold, a completely different formula takes effect. I couldn’t teach Henri Weissmann the exponential effect of the decay coefficient on the drift differential . . .”
“The drift differential of paint?” Louise said teasingly. He was so worked up today. More than usual. She was about to offer him one of the still-warm poppy cakes she’d made earlier that morning.
“Correct,” Saul said, ignoring the lightness in her tone. “I couldn’t teach Elias this, and he and I worked together for twenty years! I’ve spent a thousand days perfecting my formula. You think this Wirtz fellow they want to bring in understands the decay drift, the cascade losses? He doesn’t know the answer because he doesn’t even know the question! The truth isn’t in the steel and copper. It’s in me.” Saul stabbed himself hard in the chest with his index finger. “Is that what I’m here for—to teach Karl Wirtz? And in German, no less? No.” Saul shook his head adamantly. “They’re bringing him in because they think they can replace me.” He scoffed. “They understand nothing. Without me the whole thing is just wires and dust. I’m not the cog in the machine. I am the machine.”
Saul broke off suddenly. “Louise? Are you all right? You’ve gone positively ashen. Sit, sit, I don’t want you to fall. My God, you look like you’re about to faint. What happened? I’m sorry I went off like that. I just got the news this morning and was still reeling. I’m so happy you came. To talk to someone other than—well. It’s a comfort, that’s all. And you’re looking just wonderful. A little less so now.” He chuckled solicitously. “Do you need a glass of water? Let me go get it. I’ll be right back.”
Sunk in Saul’s chair by the open window, Louise sat with suspended breath, caught in suspended time, staring out at the lawn. The hedge perimeter. Two relaxed guards, leaning against the posts, smoking and joking. The dirt road behind them—the ruts and the channels flattened, graded. The overgrown brush, and the drop off to the Albert Canal beyond that.
In that last white flickering newsreel frame—between what had been and what was coming—Louise remembered her father, and the girl she once was.
When she was nine and he was three months from dying, they went fishing. They’d gone out early one morning, to the quiet stream off the Sûre River, and in the low hills and shady trees of Bastogne sat for a few blissful hours on the banks, angling for some trout. When no fish came, they stood in the shallows where the mud sucked at their ankles and the dragonflies buzzed low. Their lines kept breaking. If it breaks, it breaks, her father kept saying. It means the thing at the end of the line is alive. That’s all that matters. A cigarette he never got around to smoking dangled behind his ear. She kept seeing his face in profile, eyes twinkling, him murmuring, Just one more throw, Loosha, one more, we’ll get lucky this time, I feel it.
They walked home with empty hands and dirty legs, the basket banging against her knee.
“Now we’ll have to eat your mother’s cooking,” Maurice said.
“Maman is making rabbit stew, Papa,” said Louise.
“What did that poor rabbit ever do to deserve such punishment?” said Maurice. “I adore your mother, Lou. But that rabbit should have run faster.”
They passed an inn, Auberge du Marronnier, and stopped in. They sat outside in the dust, at the table with the peeling red paint. Louise kept chipping it anxiously, half expecting her mother to come looking for them down the dry road. Maurice ordered a citron pressé for her and a glass of Kir for himself. They shared a plate of boulettes in tomato sauce with hunks of crusty bread. The sauce was sweet and burnt, and a drop of it stained his white sleeve.
“Look, Papa,” she said, pointing to her father’s shirt. “Now Maman will know.”
He shrugged with a smile. “It’s the mark of a man who lived well today,” said Maurice, reaching across and patting Louise’s hand.
When she got home, Louise went straight to Fletcher in the rear garden. “Fletcher,” she said. “I know where your uranium is.”
86
THE CONVERSATION
“IT’S NOT IN HAIGERLOCH,” Louise said. “It’s at Zvart Haus.”
After the collective gasp, the how do you know?! the fifth fuck, there was silence. A sparrow nested in the hollow of the elm again, darting in and out as if nothing had changed. Fletcher’s hands were flat on the table. Rafael smoked—and smoked again. Louise crumbled a poppy cake between her fingers. Charlie sat opposite them, watching all three. She was trying to make sense of it, not just the stunning information, but the actual implications.
