------- ------- RiverQuest ------- ------- Chapter 1 ------- ------- "Wilkie!" ------- "Yo!" I shouted. ------- The clipboard snapped shut. Sergeant Gaines stood with his legs apart and his hands behind his back. ------- "When I fall you men out, I want you to pick up on your equipment and board the train car smartly. Let me hear you now." ------- "Yes, Sergeant Gaines!" ------- He cupped a hand behind his ear. "I can't heeeear you, troops." ------- "YES, SERGEANT GAINES!" Loud enough to rattle the metal roof of the train shed. ------- We were standing at attention under the yellow light of the overheads. Our duffle bags were piled up like king-sized turds. ------- Gaines looked us over and shook his head real slow. ------- "Y'all one pathetic looking bunch of pussies. But you're my boys now. Me and Sergeant Morgan gonna shape you up so you mamas wouldn't know you." I'd seen the big colored guy back in the shadows, grinning like an ape. ------- "Y'all have a nice ride, gentlemen. We'll collect your sorry asses down in Frankfurt." Gaines gave the order to fall out, and he and Morgan took off up the platform. ------- "Je-sus," Bobby Jeske said. -------"Shitkickers and smart-assed spades,” I said. “Just like in the States." ------- We’d docked at Bremerhaven at 0600 hours, 20 March 1959, and spent the whole dumb day getting sorted out. After evening chow we double-timed it to the platform and waited another hour for a train to pull in. ------- All the seats were taken when I got on. Guys were lying in the aisle, and the iron luggage racks were full. The duffle bag above my head was Faramelli's. I tapped the big Eye-tie on the shoulder and told him I was going to move his junk. He watched me do it. ------- The fairy saw it too. I winked at him. Murray was a college kid with a degree in psychology and smart enough to keep his mouth shut. I hauled my one-eighty up onto the luggage rack. ------- ------- We were already in Frankfurt when I woke up. The sun was shining through the glass roof of the big station and lighting up the dust and smoke. Sergeant Gaines came on board looking sharp in starched fatigues. ------- "I want you men to mache schnell out to the buses," he said. "You get your morning chow at the Kaserne." ------- We were replacements for the First Battalion of the 36th Artillery in Dubinhausen. It was a Redstone outfit, the Army's biggest missile. We'd fired s couple at White Sands, and they both overshot the impact area by fifty miles. Murray said it was just an oversized V-2, and even the Krauts could hit a target the size of London. ------- I'd been through advanced training at the Fort Sill Missile School with most of the guys on the bus, but the corporal sitting next to me was an old fart I'd never seen before. He tipped his cap down over his eyes. I could smell the booze. ------- “Buddy Foss,” he said. He held out a hand without looking up. “What’s your name, boy?” ------- “Bill Wilkie,” I told him. Christ, his hand was like a piece of rusty iron. ------- "Where you from?" ------- "Bayonne," I said, "New Jersey." ------- "Never heard of it. Look, I'm all tore up. Wake me when we get there, will ya? ------- "Sure, Buddy," I said. "Coffee and a Danish?" He laughed. ------- ------- The bus pulled out, and I got my first good look at Germany. It was fifteen years since the war, but there were city blocks still weeds and rubble. The people were dressed in old clothes and mostly walking or riding beat up bicycles. ------- I took it in, the signs, the cobblestones, the yellow mail boxes, and the string bags they all carried. It was different from anything I'd ever seen before. ------- Except for new buildings near the station, what wasn't bombed to bits looked hundreds of years old. The army bus blatted along the narrow streets and past bombed-out factories and then rows of tiny houses and garden plots. We rode on through green fields and pine forests and pretty villages that smelled like shit. ------- I was half asleep when I heard Foss mumbling. He was staring out the window at a field of yellow flowers. ------- “Huh,” he said. “Fuckin’ tulips.” He turned and saw me looking. -------"Wake your ass, Bayonne. We’re almost home." ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 2 ------- ------- Cookie laughed. "Wake your ass be about right." ------- We were drinking beer at a table outside the Kaffé zum Kaiserhof, and I was telling Cookie about my first day in Germany a year ago. I’d needed a kick in the ass in those day, but it wasn't Foss that got me going. It was guys like Bob Murray and Jim Cook. ------- For all Gaines's talk, our battalion training didn't amounted to squat. After two weeks as company clerk I lucked into temp duty with the Corps Artillery Test Team. We had a colonel, a major, twenty-three lieutenants, and a drunken warrant officer. There were only a dozen PFC's to run the radios and type reports. We could pretty much ignore the junior brass. ------- We had to work all night sometimes, but Major Prego brought us coffee and doughnuts. We didn't pull guard duty or KP, and we wrote our own weekend passes. I was sorry I ever had to go back to the battalion, but even that turned out okay. ------- I'd been thinking about it all afternoon. It was the flowers in the window box that reminded me of Buddy Foss. ------- "Foss was drunk," I said. ------- "No shit, you ever seen him sober?" ------- "It’s hard to tell," I agreed. "He has his better days. Gaines says they'll let him get his pension. He says Foss got shit-faced in Normandy and walked into an enemy command post wearing a general's stars and a pair of chrome-plated revolvers. The Krauts thought he was Patton, and a whole armored division surrendered. He got the Silver Star." ------- Cookie snorted. "Gaines is jivin' you, Bayonne. That boy is trash, and Buddy don't know which way is up. They make honkies like you look good." ------- "Thanks, Cook," I said. "I know Buddy's full of crap. The colonel says he's been walking wounded since Korea." ------- "Foss pay you back your sixty bucks?" ------- I shrugged, and Cookie shook his head in disgust. His arms were folded across his chest, and he was frowning at the chessboard. He reached out a big brown finger and let it rest on his queen, then he smiled. ------- "I do believe that's checkmate, troop. Nice game." ------- "Nice for you," I said. I was getting my Sunday afternoon chess lesson, but I couldn't concentrate. ------- Frau Bauer picked up my empty glass and asked if I wanted another beer. ------- "Ja,” I told her, “noch ein Dunkles, bitte." They liked it when you spoke Kraut. ------- It was the end of May, and the sun was hot. I could still smell the herd of sheep that had crossed the stone bridge over the Wisselbach, but we were used to the stink by now. The Wiss drained every barnyard in twenty klics. The little river sparkled in the sunlight where it followed a line of poplars across the plowed hop fields. ------- Not many GI's made into Dubinhausen. The action was outside the Kaserne at Sophie's Bar, where the jukebox was always playing "Teen Angel," and you had to walk around the barf. Murray says Sophie entertained the Roman legions when Caesar conquered Gaul. ------- Cook and I found the Kaiserhof the day he joined our outfit. It was the Sunday after Christmas. This big black guy walked into the barracks and dumped two duffle bags on an empty bunk. He asked if anybody wanted to go in town. It sounded better than listening to Teddy Ball’s 45 of "A Summer Place.” ------- He said his name was Jim Cook, but they called him “Cookie.” He seemed pretty sharp for Regular Army ------- The streets of Dubinhausen were deserted. We could hear our boots crunching in the snow. The only place open was the Gasthaus Zum Kaiserhof, so Cookie said let’s try the local brew. ------- The air inside was thick with smoke. The whole town was there, playing cards at long wooden tables and drinking beer. They'd brought the kids, and the dogs were sleeping under the benches. I told Cookie they wouldn't want us, and he said, screw ‘em, we won the war. ------- A few old men grüss-Gotted us. The Frau put us at a table in the corner and served our beer and the best bread and sausage I'd ever eaten, and nobody said shit. We'd gone back every Sunday we didn't have a weekend pass. ------- Dubinhausen was a picture postcard today. The square in front of the Gasthaus was paved with stones worn round as cannonballs, and the half-timbered houses barely propped each other up. Murray read that Charlemagne had founded Dubinhausen in 801. ------- The farmers were spreading manure on the fields, and even the honeywagons smelled sweet. I was so short I couldn't start a long conversation or smoke king-sized cigarettes. I'd be on the train to Bremerhaven in two days. It was Cook's last week in Germany, too, the last time we'd drink Dubinhausen Dunkles at the Kaiserhof. ------- Cook made the months since Christmas go quick. Most of the colored GI's hung out in the back room at Sophie's or at the Schwartzer bars in A'berg, but Cook and I had hit it off. I'd come back to the battalion after my TDY with the Test Team, and Cookie was assigned to us for a place to bunk until he shipped out. ------- The army had worked out great for me. I'd done my time in Germany without the mickey-mouse. I'd met Cookie, Murray, and LeMieux, and had a lot of laughs. It was almost over now. The Land-of-the-Round-Door-Knob was looking good. ------- Cookie wanted out bad. He'd been a sergeant with the Special Forces until they busted him for slugging an officer. He was headed for art school in Atlanta. ------- I couldn't believe what I was doing. The letter had come that Friday. “...pleased to inform you that you have been admitted to the Columbia University Class of 1964.” It was signed by Rachel Zimmer in the Admissions Office. -------“Columbia Jewniversity,” Jeske said. -------“Jews are smart, Jeske,” I said. ------- She'd written on the bottom, “We need students like you.” Like a hole in the head, but it was nice of them to say so. ------- Cookie made some crack I didn't catch. Ma says you can read me like a book. I glanced over at the next table. A couple of farm boys were drinking with their Frauleins and getting louder as the beer went down. ------- "I don't like the way those guys keep looking at us, Cook." ------- "Lookin’ to beat up on the nigger, Bayonne. Think we ought to take off?" ------- "Sure," I said. I had stuff to do, and the last thing we needed was trouble with the Kamerads. ------- We paid Frau Bauer and said auf Wiedersehen. I didn't tell her we weren’t coming back. It’s hard enough to understand people when you speak their language. -------Horst, the Nazi dipshit who came around to sell encyclopedias, said it just was the Schwarzers they didn't want, but they didn't want any of us. He was telling me the story of his life a little at a time. I'd have told him I was Polish, but I wanted to hear what he had to say. We never saw him after Cookie came. ------- "Tweedledum and Tweedledee are coming, Cook." The farm boys left half-finished beers and walked behind us arm-in-arm the way they do. Christ, the one guy must have been 280. They were wearing the ugly suits that Murray calls mustard-à-la-mode. I figured they were waiting until we got across the field to make their move. They caught up near the patch of woods the Germans leave on every hilltop. ------- "You, Neger, you not come our Kafé." ------- "Whooo-whee! You hear the boy, Bayonne? The peasants speak Amerikanische. You can have your café, Fritz. My friend and I are going home." They were still moving in on us, so Cookie held up his hands. ------- "Yo, Kamrad," he said. "Friede, big fellow! Peas and hominy, you dumb dickhead." ------- The Krauts weren't buying it. The ox in the poop-striped suit stood in front of us. ------- "Hey, nein," I said. "Machen Sie nichts den Neger boese." I thought I'd better warn them. ------- "Mache den Neger Schmutz," the big one said. -------The other guy took a swing. I blocked it and landed a right to his chest. When he saw it wasn't going to be a boxing match, he pulled back and lunged to take me down. Cookie's fist caught him on the chin and laid him in the stubble. ------- "I know you could have handled him, Bayonne." ------- "That’s okay," I said. I heard a whimper and turned to see the big one sitting on the ground. ------- "Didn’t want one of us getting hurt,” Cookie said. “So long, Fritz." ------- We walked on towards the barracks. ------- "I hate that shit," Cookie said. Neither of us said anything more for a couple minutes. Then Cookie laughed. ------- "What do we care about a couple of dumb Krauts. It's over, Bayonne. We made it." ------- "Yeah, Cookie,” I said, “and it was all right.” ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 3 ------- ------- I slid my travel pay away from the spilled coffee and tried to figure it out. Twenty-two fifty is a lot more than you need to go from Brooklyn to Bayonne, but it wouldn’t get Cookie to Atlanta. My friends Bob Murray, Ed LeMieux, and Jim Cook were all out now, and this was my last day. I’d be in the active reserves, but I wasn’t worried. Ike had called Kruschev's bluff in Berlin, and who else would give us trouble? ------- I’d sat through a debriefing about the $800 re-enlistment bonus and how we couldn’t give out military secrets. I had a clearance so I could type up reports about the nukes, but I wasn’t going to meet a Russian spy in Jersey. The lieutenant said good luck, and that was it. ------- I’d changed into civvies before some sergeant could grab me for a work detail and stopped at the snack bar for a cheap burger. Suddenly I wasn't in a hurry to get home. ------- My buddies were all over, Murray and Ed, Teddy Ball, Tony and Cookie. Elvis was back too. I’d never seen him in Germany, but the Stars and Stripes said he was a good soldier. -------There was a lot I'd never forget, like the day we went down to Fort Dix from the induction center in Newark. -------I was with a couple of guys I knew, but my buddy Feszko got out on a freaking football injury. We had DA haircuts and leather jackets, trying to look cool. The bus driver let us buy a case of beer. ------- It was dark when we got to Dix. The drill instructors were hollering before the bus stopped. We got our heads shaved and loaded down with gear. My shirt sleeves came past my knuckles, but so did everybody else’s. With our hair cut off and our dicks hanging out, you couldn't tell the Jersey City hoods from the rich kids. That’s how I got in with Murray and the college guys. ------- I had another cup of coffee and wondered what was up. I'd been thinking about this day for months. I’d even felt a stupid lump in my throat when the Upshaw pulled into New York Harbor, and I saw the Statue of Liberty like my grandfather saw her when he came over from Poland in 1910. From Bayonne you see her ass. ------- I finally figured I was scared. I don't know how Murray talked me applying to college. Either they’d screwed up, or it was an experiment, and I was the kid that didn't get the vitamins. ------- ------- I still had twenty bucks of my travel pay, so I went home and took the folks to dinner at the Mandarin. ------- “You’ve grown, Willy,” Ma said. ------- “Same size as when I left, Ma.” ------- “She means you’re not a horse’s ass,” Pop said. ------- ------- Feszco threw a party so I could meet some girls. I was pissed when I got the Dear John from Susan, but if she was that hot to trot Pulski could have her. I saw she'd put on weight. ------- Pretty soon it was like I hadn’t been away. Ma told everybody what a hotshot I was, and I was back to being little Willy. The baseball trophies and model cars were still in my room. ------- In the service, nobody put down the college guys, but some of my friends thought I was running out on them. At least my old science teacher was pleased. He said he knew I had it in me. ------- A couple times I thought of bagging it and getting a Corvette. Pop hadn't owned a heap since I blew the engine on the Olds. He didn't need one with St. Stan's next door and Tappy’s Tavern down the block. ------- I GI'ed the show with a broom and hot suds. Pop didn’t say anything. I collected his overdue bills. Pop does nice work, but bikers have to be reminded. ------- One Saturday I rode an old Harley over to Jersey City. Tony wanted me to meet his mouse. I think I must have been for Tony what Murray was for me, a guy who had it together more than he did. ------- I liked his girl. Vivian didn't know a lot, but she wasn’t dumb. She had the right idea about Tony. She wanted him to get a job. Tony was plenty smart, but he seemed more like punk than the funny guy I’d known in Germany. I kidded him when he turned down a restaurant because they couldn't give us a table against the wall. He didn’t even smile. ------- I showed them slides I'd taken on our last field exercise and Tony, Ed, and me drinking beer at the Hofbrauhaus in Munich. I had a good time, but I didn't know what the hell he wanted from me. I don’t guess he did either. ------- "Take care of him," I said to Vivian. ------- "If he'll let me." She didn't sound that hopeful. ------- "Take care of yourself, Bayonne," Tony said. "Don't let 'em bust your head in school." ------- "I won't," I said. "That's not where we keep our brains." ------- "Oh yeah," he said. "Hey, what happens when you cross a Polack with a Mafioso?" ------- "What Ant’ny?" I said. ------- "You get a guy who makes himself an offer he can't understand." ------- I laughed, but I felt bad for him. ------- ------- Sometimes I wanted to tell people I wasn't the jerk who’d thrown his money around and wrecked his wheels. Murray was right. He said they'd treat me like I never went away. I hoped I could stick it out, because I thought college was worth a try. It was 1960, and maybe something was going to happen for a change. ------- ------- ------- Chapter 4 ------- ------- "You got a phone call from the college, Willy." ------- I was Willy to Ma and Pop on account of being William Wilkie, Jr. Our name had been Wilkinowski before my grandfather changed it in 1910. He was standing with ten thousand other Polacks under the big glass roof on Ellis Island when it hit him no one knew his ass from Yankee Doodle. He thought a name like “Herman Wilkie” would be easier to live with. -------Grandpa did okay. He found a wife and a good job in a bakery. Then the war came, and he was killed by a German shell at Chateau-Thierry. ------- Our phone’s in the kitchen, so it's hard to have a private conversation. Ma handed me the receiver and stood there looking worried. ------- It was Miss Zimmer from the Admissions Office. She wanted to know if I could come in to talk about the Fall. What could I say? We set it up for four o'clock that afternoon. ------- Ma gave me some money and made me buy a pair of loafers. I put on a tie and the corduroy jacket I hadn't worn since graduation. It was a little tight in the shoulders. -------“What do you think?” I asked Grandma. “Do I look like a rich kid from Montclair?” She howled. ------- I was getting nervous by the time I came out of the subway at 116th street. I blinked in the sunlight and caught a glimpse of a beautiful babe. She was tall with long blond hair and a terrific tan. I watched her trot her ass across Broadway. ------- It was a terrific spring day. There were kids sitting on benches and going in and out of buildings that looked like mausoleums. A couple of good looking girls smiled at me. ------- I found Preston Hall and was standing outside Miss Zimmer's office at five to four. I heard voices inside, so I walked up and down the hallway like an idiot. At five after, I stood near the half open door. ------- A guy was talking, he sounded angry. "We're very concerned about this, Miss Zimmer," he said. ------- "You’ve made that clear, Mr. Johnson,” Zimmer told him. “I just don’t know where they are. I guess they’ve gone somewhere." ------- I moved where I could see them. The man was tall and good looking and had a classy suit. He said something I didn’t catch. ------- "No. I can't come to your office! There’s nothing more to tell you, sir. Look, my four o'clock appointment’s waiting in the hall." ------- That was me. I knocked hard and poked my head in. ------- "Hi, Miss Zimmer," I said. "Sorry I'm late." The guy looked pissed. ------- “We’re not finished here, son.” -------“Yeah, you are,” I said. ------- He flashed a badge. “FBI. You’re interfering with an investigation.” ------- “Not yet,” I said. He tried to stare me down. -------“We’ll continue this later,” he growled and walked out. -------Neither of us said anything for a second. Then she pulled herself together. -------"Bill Wilkie? I'm Rachel Zimmer. It’s good to see you." She came around her desk and shook my hand. -------I said it was nice to meet her, too. She was tall and slim but definitely all there, pretty fine in fact. The gray sweater looked good with her red hair and green eyes. She couldn't have been much older than me. -------"Thanks for what you did,” she said. -------“Think he’ll come back?” I asked. -------“I don’t know, and I’d rather not find out.” -------“Then let’s go somewhere,” I said. “I’ll buy you a beer.” -------“What!” She laughed. “Sorry, I forgot you’re not a kid. Sure, why not. It’s that kind of day.” She stuffed some papers in a brief case, I saw my picture, my best James Dean imitation, got her purse out of a drawer, and we took off. -------“I don’t want to get you in trouble,” I said. -------“With the FBI or the Dean?” -------“The FBI. Who’s the Dean?” -------“My boss, the Dean of Admissions. I’m not sure he’d go for this.” -------We left the campus and walked down Broadway. I was feeling good. ------- “I appreciate your coming in on short notice, Bill,” she said. “I hope it wasn't inconvenient." ------- "No, ma'am,” I said. “I’m not real busy." ------- She had a nice laugh. "Better call me ‘Rachel,’ hot shot, if you’re buying me a beer. You have a job for the summer?" ------- “I’m working with my dad in his repair shop. I get room and board and a little cash. I saved my army pay for college." ------- "I know you did." ------- I must have looked surprised. ------- "It on your application. This place is okay.” ------- It was clean, and there were tables. I got us a couple drafts. -------"You were in Germany with the army,” she said. “That must have been a wonderful experience. I took my junior year in Paris. I'd give anything to go back." ------- "Parts of it were great,” I said. “Paris was really something, but the army's the same everywhere. Our base had a PX and a movie, and the Armed Forces Radio played cow music, just like in the States." I smiled at the look on her face. ------- "I'm putting you on," I said. "I got out all I could, and not many guys went to Paris. The French were too foreign. I remember a Kraut waitress chewing out some long haired kids for looking like Frenchies.” ------- “The war wasn’t so long ago," Rachel said. -------Fifteen years seemed pretty long to me, but I wasn’t going to argue. ------- “Germany really got it,” I said. “The city near our base was flattened. They said an American pilot had to bail out and got strung up. On the next raid the planes flew over and doubled back. The Krauts thought they’d dumped their load and didn't sound the alarm. A lot of civilians were killed. -------“I guess they ought to hate us, but they treated me okay. The French, too, but really I liked the Germans. Except the concentration camps! I mean....” She held up her hand. ------- “The Vichy French sent thousands of Jews to Germany to be killed.” I shook my head. I didn’t know. “We had camps, too. A hundred-thousand Japanese-Americans were interned during the war. They were American citizens, and they lost their farms and businesses. We dropped the atom bomb and firebombed Hamburg and Dresden. It wasn’t just the Germans.” -------“I didn’t know about the Japs either,” I said. “Listen, I’m sorry....” -------“No, forget it. I don’t know why I’m saying this. It’s just something I’ve thought about. Anyway, I’m not surprised they treated you okay. -------“I see you played baseball. Varsity your sophomore year.” ------- “I’m a pretty good hitter,” I said. “I almost tried out for the minors.” ------- “Columbia’s not a big sports school,” she said, “but they have a good ball team. You could think about it.” ------- “Sure,” I said. “I’d like that. I played in the army, but it was hard to get good teams. You like baseball?” ------- “I was a Dodgers fan. I still haven’t gotten over O’Malley taking them to L.A.” ------- “Money,” I said. “They don’t care about the fans, just their butts in a seat. Moses wouldn’t build O’Malley a new ballpark, so he took off.” -------We had another beer. She wanted to hear about the army, and Bayonne, and what I planned to study. She was easy to talk to, but I didn’t see where it was going. ------- "Why’d you want to see me, Rachel? This about my scholarship?" ------- "No, you’re all set. Like I said on the phone, we always talk with students we think might have academic difficulties. But you’ll do fine. I’m sorry if I worried you.” ------- “I don’t worry easy,” I said, “but this is a big deal to me.” ------- “Do you know why you were accepted?" ------- "Not really," I admitted. ------- "It wasn’t your academic record." I had to laugh. Half the kids in my school never made it to class. ------- "The Army had good things to say, but it was the letters from your teachers.” She pulled a paper out of her brief case. “Listen to this: ‘honest and reliable;’ ‘you can count on Bill;’ ‘polite, highly intelligent;’ ‘kind...a really fine young man.’ Why did she say that?" ------- "I don't know," I lied. ------- "No? ‘If he ever gets off his ass, this guy’s a winner.’” She grinned. ------- “Jesus,” I said, “Mr. Cluffy?” -------“Uh-huh.'Despite his mediocre grades, Bill learned a great deal in school.'” She looked up. “You got A's in biology and chemistry." -------“That was interesting,” I said. “I did the work in class.” -------“Listen, Bill.” She sounded serious. “You’ll do great in college. You’re smart, and self-confident, and....” Her ears turned pink. ------- “Hey,” I said, “what’s up?” -------“I don’t.... Oh, God! It’s not your problem, Bill. It’s stupid, but that creep really got to me." ------- "I know,” I said, “I heard you." ------- "Thanks again for coming in like that." ------- "Nothing to it," I said. "You all right?” ------- “Really, I’m fine. It’s just...something I have to deal with.” ------- “None of my business,” I said, “but if that guy gives you trouble....” -------"He’s just doing his job. They’re looking for my uncle. He teaches math at a college near Flagstaff. I’m supposed to go out for a visit, but they aren’t answering the phone. The school doesn’t know anything, so I got the police to send someone to the house, and it’s closed up, and their car’s gone. They thought I was nuts. Now the FBI wants him. They say he’s working for the Defense Department and has classified information.” -------“So what are you going to do?" ------- “I don’t know. I was going to fly out there tomorrow. If my mom could go too.... But she can't walk out on her job. It’s just.... I’m scared.” -------“Hey, Rachel,” I said. -------“What?” -------“I’ll go with you.” -------“No, I didn’t mean....” -------“I know you didn’t. It’s my idea, and I guess it’s dumb. You’re probably thinking....” ------- “No! No, I wasn’t thinking anything. Look, you’re a nice guy..., but it would be an imposition." -------"You could hire a pro," I said. ------- "A bodyguard? I’d feel silly. You’re smart, and you’ve had military training." ------- "Yeah,” I said, “in guided missiles." ------- She laughed. "I don't expect trouble. I just have to make sure my aunt and uncle are okay. Look at this.” -------She took a folded paper out of her purse and handed it to me. ------- ------- Rachel, dear, this is for emergencies. Say ------- nothing to anyone. We’ll see you soon. Karl. ------- -------"That came two days ago by registered mail, with a -------check for...a lot of money." ------- “Your Uncle Karl?” ------- "My great uncle. He’s a genius. He has a lot of patents on computer programs. I didn’t know he was working for the government." She stopped. "You sure? It could be dangerous." -------“Yep,” I said. -------She looked at me for a second. -------“What the hell. I’d be really grateful. Just for a couple days. I’ll pay you.” ------- “You don’t have to do that.” -------“Of course, I do.” -------“Okay,” I said. I felt like I’d re-enlisted. ------- ------- Chapter 5 ------- ------- ------- -------“You’re going to Arizona with some woman?” -------“She’s a college official, Ma. It’s sort of hush-hush. They don’t want me to talk about it.” ------- "It’s a load of you-know-what, Willy. How old is she?" ------- "Don't know. Older than me." ------- Ma shook her head, but she let it go. ------- ------- I got to Idlewild an hour early. I’d never been on an airplane, but at least it wasn’t a troopship. We’d caught the tail end of a hurricane out of Portsmouth, and I was sick for two days. When the sun came out, we lay on the deck with our dog tags over our eyeballs like zombies. I promised myself no more ships. ------- ------- “Hey, you look great,” I said. Wow, did she. She wasn’t as skinny as I’d thought. -------“Thanks,” she said. ------- "You flown before?" ------- "A couple times. How about you?" ------- "Nope,” I said. I told her about the Upshur. The Upchuck we’d called it. It wasn’t so bad, I said. I’d slept a lot and read a book about the ocean. -------We went to the Jersey shore so my grandma could ride the roller coaster at Asbury. I liked the beaches. I’d been on the dunes at Sandy Hook and in the Watchung Mountains. They were a glacial moraine Mr. Kluffy said, a pile of rocks. ------- The German forests were more like parks, with the trees planted in rows. The old women came through every morning to pick up any dead wood. Murray, Ed, and I drove down to the Alps once. Murray said nature lovers are all fascists, but he hadn't grow up in Jersey. -------I was sitting behind a machine gun the first time I heard a cuckoo. We saw deer and quail, and I woke up with a hedgehog in my sleeping bag. A couple of weeks before I got out, I was half asleep in a foxhole, watching some old women work a field. They wore baggy black dresses like in a painting Cookie showed me. It was starting to get dark when a church bell rang, and they packed up their tools and went home. -------I told her all this stuff. I’d never talked so much in my life. ------- "I got a lot of catching up to do in school.” ------- "You’ll do fine,” she said. “That’s what the first year of college is for. If you like nature, I’ll bet you’d like Cape Cod." ------- "What's it like?" ------- "Woods and salt marsh, the ocean and the bay. The tide goes out a mile in the bay, and you can walk the flats. It's the one place I go that doesn't change." ------- "Bayonne doesn't change much," I said, "and that's not its best feature." I told her about growing up on the docks and how my grand pop shipped over from Poland. Rachel said her grandfather came from Russia around the same time. ------- "He graduated from Boston Latin, an immigrant kid on scholarship. He’d have gone to Harvard, but he got the girl next door pregnant. I wish I knew more about his life. He became an efficiency expert and the vice-president of a chemical company. I was only fifteen when he died, five years before my Dad. I want my Ph.D. for him and Dad as much as me. Hey, you listen petty good." ------- -------From the air, New York looked like the model Vinnie and I made in seventh grade. Vinnie’d hang around long enough to make a clay cunt and then take off. The model came out so good they put it in the front hall. “Created by William Wilkie and Vincent Lorenzo.” What a laugh. ------- “There’s Sandy Hook!” ------- “Uh huh.” ------- “Am I talking too much?” ------- “No! I....” She punched my arm. “I couldn't put you down." ------- “I'm not bulletproof,” I said, “but you go with what you got." She smiled. ------- I asked her what her uncle was doing for the government. ------- “Probably something to do with computers, but I don’t understand it. He’s never has a good thing to say about the government, any government. I thought they went to Arizona to get away from that.” ------- We talked a little more, and she got out a book. I almost didn’t bring Huckleberry Finn, but I had to find out what happened to Huck and Jim. Tom Sawyer was such a jerk. ------- Lunch was pretty bad. I ate half of Rachel’s. -------"I want you to get your money’s worth.” ------- “Thanks, Bill. Anyone ever call you ‘William’?" ------- Susan had, William the Conqueror. I thought it was funny. -------"No,” I said, “not really. Rachel's a nice name." ------- "It’s okay. I wanted to be named ‘Mary’. I read a book about a English girl who’s born in India and goes to England to live with an uncle." ------- "Mary Lennox," I said. ------- "You read The Secret Garden!" ------- "I read it to my sister." ------- "It was my favorite book for years." ------- "No shit?" ------- "It's every little girl's favorite book. When Mary’s parents die, she can be anything she wants. It's the ultimate fantasy." ------- “She turned out all right.” I said. “I liked the boys, smart and good at things." ------- "Right,” she said. “That's every big girl's fantasy.” ------- ------- The Smoky Mountains looked like oatmeal. The Mississippi wasn’t much, but the ox bow lakes were like the pictures in my sixth grade geography book. Rachel had to lean across me to see them. ------- The sun was low in the sky by the time we flew over Oklahoma. It lit up an ocean of clouds that stretched to the horizon. We watched through the window until it was dark. ------- ------- We had a sandwich at the Dallas airport and caught the flight to Flagstaff. I figured Rachel would want me to drive the rental car, but she didn’t. We said good night in the hotel lobby. ------- I couldn’t fall sleep. The army had been a time out from dead-end jobs and a hazy future, and especially from girls like Rachel. ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 5 ------- -------I met a kid from Arizona in the Army who told me his dad stuck a sign on their gate saying it was sighted in for a 30/06 with a four-power scope. I said that sounded like New York. You can see the city across the harbor from Bayonne. In the morning sun, it looks a lot like the mountains that were spread out across the window of the coffee shop. ------- "Hey, Bill." -------There she was. She had on a lemon-yellow sweater that looked terrific. The guys at the next table were checking her out. ------- "Morning, chief. Want some breakfast? It’s good coffee." ------- "You kidding?” She glanced at the menu. “I’ll have the cheese omelet, hash browns, toast, and sausage.” -------I ordered ham and eggs and gave her a rundown on the news and ball scores. ------- "How about waking up to those mountains every day?" The sun had touched the peaks. The air was so clear the pines looked like they'd been drawn in pen and ink. ------- "If they even look at them. People just don’t. I’ve never been to the Statue of Liberty." ------- “You haven’t missed much,” I said. “She looks better from a distance. We used to sneak over to Ellis Island at night. Spooky as hell." ------- "It must be closed now?" ------- "For thirty years. They all come by air now. The plane was okay, but it didn’t feel like we were going anywhere. I like trains." ------- "Me too,” Rachel said. ”I wanted a model railroad when I was a kid." ------- "You could have one now." ------- "Too late." ------- “Not if you want one. My uncle has a basement full of them. He’s a little strange." ------- "I’m strange enough without working at it, thanks. I really do like trains. We rode in a Pullman to Chicago once. I still remember the sound and smell when we went between cars. I watched the sun come up and the farmers drive their mules to the fields." ------- “I went all over Europe on the trains,” I said. “I used them for hotels. There’s so much great stuff to see. They have a terrific zoo in Frankfurt. You can have a beer at the cafe and reach through the bars to pet the tigers. My grandma made me take her to the zoo last week." ------- "Good for her. Did you pet the tigers?" ------- “Grandma would have,” I said, “but she scared them.” -------When we stood to go, Rachel gave the guys at the next table a big smile. ------- "I didn't think you'd seen them." ------- "You’re joking!" ------- "Kid stuff," I said. ------- "You want to drive? I can if you’d rather." ------- "No, I’ll drive,” I said, “I drove a colonel all over Bavaria last year. I’ll take it easy." ------- "Not for me. Aren’t you a biker?" ------- "Nope, but we can go as fast as you like. I was drunk when I totaled my ’58 Merc a couple years ago. I got away with sixty stitches. The colonel couldn’t order me over the speed limit." ------- "You know what passive-aggressive means?" ------- "Not gung-ho?" ------- “They said you did a good job." ------- "I stayed out of the stockade. I can work hard. I have since I was a kid, and I always blew my money as fast as I made it. I’ve done a lot of stupid stuff, but I was never dumb enough to be a biker. Murray says they need the horsepower between their legs.” -------That didn’t rate a comment. ------- "Nice mountains." Rocky peaks began to rise out of the forest. "What you said about the locals.... I met some guys at Fort Sill that were buttheads about most things, but they knew the woods." ------- "So I was wrong." ------- “I didn’t say that. I just mean you see what's important to you." ------- The von Schauss's cabin was in the hills. No signs. Uncle Karl didn't expect company, or didn’t want it. The road switch backed through forest so thick it was almost dark. I was glad we had a gas-eater with a stick. ------- We came out of the tall pines onto a meadow filled with flowers. Dozens of gray boulders were scattered over the hillside like buffalos. A huge four-story log cabin stood in the middle of the field. ------- "I can’t believe it,” Rachel said. “They had a 3-room ranch house. I knew they’d bought a cabin, but I never imagined anything like this." ------- The quiet hit us when I cut the engine. It was creepy even in the sun. The house was built of polished tree trunks, with heavy shutters on the lower windows. The front door was padlocked. ------- The garage was empty except for a truck with spider webs in the wheel wells. I picked up a piece of pipe to see if I could pry open a shutter. I was starting to get a bad feeling. ------- "I could climb to one of those windows." I pointed to the un-shuttered third floor -------“It's not as easy as it looks." ------- "Climbing a wall?" ------- "You’re too heavy. I’ve done some rock climbing, up along the Hudson." ------- “No kidding?” ------- We were headed back to the car when something big came out of the woods and started towards us. It was a bear, a grizzly, between us and the car. ------- “Go around the back of the house," I said. I tossed her the keys. ------- "Bill...." ------- "Just go. I won’t do anything dumb.” ------- I should have kept my mouth shut. The bear exploded from the grass like Mantle stealing second, and I stood there holding the stupid pipe over my shoulder. It stopped fifty feet away and got interested in something in the grass and then wandered back into the trees. Rachel hadn't moved. ------- "What were you going to do?” ------- “Slug it,” I said. Walking back to the car, my legs were wobbly. ------- -------We found Riemann College in the woods south of Flagstaff. It looked deserted. -------“The kids are back at the ranch, huh?” -------“Guess again. The kids are camp counselors in the Adirondacks. Riemann sends students to MIT.” -------“Good for them,” I said. ------- The secretary of the Math Department was a cheerful woman in jeans and cowboy boots who looked like she belonged to the big Harley parked outside. She didn't know where the von Schausses were. -------"Martin Engel’s your best bet, hon. He and Karl are close. I’ll show you on the map. And listen, dear, Doc Engel’s a funny duck. The kids call him ‘the Gnome’, but they like him. I think he had a rough time in the war. You tell Karl to give me a ring, when you find them. Those old buzzards shouldn’t be out without a keeper." ------- -------“She keeps a tight rein on her profs,” I said. We were headed up a dirt track towards Engle’s place. I thought we'd worried the woman though, and she didn't look like she worried easy. -------We found Engel’s cabin a couple miles back in the woods. The small man who opened the door had wild gray hair and a beak like a Black Forest troll. ------- "Doctor Engel? I'm Rachel Zimmer, Karl and Anna's niece. And my friend Bill. We're looking for my aunt and uncle." ------- Engel seemed surprised but motioned us in. ------- The cabin had a chipped sink and a woodstove. The only furniture besides a table and chairs and an army cot was a battered upright piano. Books were piled on the floor. I saw a whiskey bottle in the trash. ------- "Sit." He pointed to the chairs and leaned on the piano. ------- "You're older than I expected, Rachel. Karl speaks of you as a child. Aren’t they at the lodge?" ------- “No sir, it was locked and the shutters closed. I’ve tried to call for the last three days.” ------- "I don’t know,” he said without expression. “Karl lives in his own world, but Anna has her feet on the ground." ------- "Do you have a key, Dr. Engel?" ------- "You said the shutters were closed, the door padlocked. We’ll look, but they’re not there. Don't worry yet. Please call me ‘Martin’." ------- He suggested we drive by the airport on the way. The von Schauss's Land Rover was parked in the lot, but nobody remembered seeing them. Rachel said Karl was hard to miss, a big man with a beard. ------- "They knew you were coming?” Martin asked. ------- “Sure,” she said. “My trip’s been planned for a month.” ------- ------- A half hour later, we stood in the doorway of the huge main room of the lodge. The roof beams soared thirty feet above us. A log balcony circled the walls. ------- "At night, it’s like being outside, Martin said. “You expect to see stars. Karl and Anna sit by the fire and listen to Wagner." ------- The house was silent. There were clothes piled on a chair in one of the bedrooms. ------- "They left in a hurry,” Martin said almost to himself. “I can’t imagine Anna not putting things away." ------- We followed him down a hallway into a room that was empty except for a desk and what looked like two pale blue refrigerators. Power cables ran into the floor. -------“I thought he might have left a message,” Martin sounded grim. He saw me looking at the boxes. ------- “A digital computer,” he said, “a PGP 11 on loan from the manufacturer. Karl writes their software." ------- "What does it do?" I asked. ------- "Complex calculations, very fast. It takes months to work out the stresses on the steel in an office building, and every figure has to be checked. Once you program a computer, it does the job in minutes, and it doesn't make mistakes.” -------He flipped a switch. Rows of lights blinked across the control panel while Martin sorted through a pile of paper tapes on Karl’s desk. ------- "The tapes load faster than punch cards. Karl’s experimenting with magnetic for storing programs." ------- He fed the roll into the machine. More lights blinked, and words appeared on a small screen: ------- -------Welcome to RiverQuest 5.1. You are alone in the Valley of Boole. You must rescue Princess Rachel from the Klugan's cave, follow the River Doom to the Castle of Karl, and find the Diamonds of Memory before The Final Destruction. Good luck. ------- "Use the keyboard." ------- I typed, “Go up the valley.” ------- "You are at the top of a cliff, looking down on a waterfall," appeared on the screen. ------- "Neat,” I said. “It can keep doing that?" ------- "Until you get tired or win the game, but that’s quite difficult. The computer makes nasty comments." ------- "It's just a machine, Martin." ------- "It’s in the program. Do this, and such-and-such happens." ------- "I'm out of my league," I said, "but wouldn't that take too many instructions? It can't all be on that roll of tape?" ------- "It is, and it isn’t. The combination of a small number of variables creates the illusion of a complex world. The next generation of computers will be a thousand times more powerful.” ------- "As smart as us?" ------- He shrugged. “You may not know if you’re talking with a person or a machine. RiverQuest is written in a highly compressed symbolic language. Karl's specialty.” He stared at the screen. -------“I don’t know what’s going on, Rachel, but he wouldn’t invite you here and vanish, and they never leave Flagstaff without telling me." Martin shut off the computer and sat on the end of the desk. ------- "Karl’s done well for DEK. They don't appreciate his humor, but he’s their genius. He created RiverQuest to demonstrate DEK’s machine, but their engineers know the 11 lacks the computing power to make it work. It’s Karl's programming, and they want the code. xxx [group to here] ------- ------- ------- Chapter 6 ------- ------- ------- There was chili in the freezer. We ate on the porch and tried to think. Martin would phone Karl and Anna’s friends, and we could double check the airport, but that was it. -------The breeze had dropped, and the sun felt good. Hawks circled in the blue-white sky. -------Rachel told Martin about the bear, and he laughed. ------- "That’s Kropotkin. He won’t hurt you. What do you know about Karl’s life in Germany?” ------- “He never talks about it,” Rachel said. ------- Martin nodded. “I was a graduate student in Berlin in the thirties. Karl was a professor at Heidelberg. We saw what was happening to Germany under Hitler. We thought the generals would take care of it, but Germans hate to disobey. ------- "No one bothered Karl until well into the war. He's from a Junker family and was doing basic research. When he refused to work on the V2, they sent him to Nordhausen, a work camp for Germans. ------- "That’s where Karl met Otto Neumann, a brilliant theorist. They invented the programmable computer in their heads. ------- "Neumann died in the camp, but Karl survived the war and went to Cal Tech in 1945. Anna’s family was Jewish and made it out in '38. In the late forties, there was pressure on Karl to do defense work, but he and Anna were citizens by then, and he could turn them down. They came to Reimann during the Korean War." ------- “So he doesn’t work for the Defense Department,” Rachel said. ------- “He’d never do that.” ------- "He's been sitting on the programs all these years?" I asked. ------- "Working on them. He's secretive even with me, but he showed me the key algorithms. I've told him he should publish his work, but Karl says the military would use it to improve their guided missiles and play war games. Ja? You know something about that?" -------“War games, yeah,” I said. “Wintersport last January was the biggest field exercise since Korea. I drove our colonel all over until he and the Corps Commander were assassinated. This guy dressed like a German general wanted a tour of the Operations Van, and the Colonel didn't even ask for ID. ------- "I was inside after that, typing the log and taking messages. I had to pin a plastic circle on the map for every nuclear strike. Europe was nuked out halfway through day-one, but nobody cared. How could you use a computer?” ------- "Create a much larger version of the Quest game and program in the opposing armies." ------- "And run a whole field exercise?" ------- "A simulation. You’d learn a great deal without committing men and guns, and you could repeat a battle under varying conditions." ------- "They like men and guns,” I said, “but I hear what you’re saying." ------- "You want the programs published," Rachel said. ------- "They will be eventually. Computers will change our world and perhaps take us beyond the present limits of our minds." ------- "We up to that?" ------- "We’ll have no choice, Bill. Karl knows it, but it amused him to create Quest and let DEK use it to test their machines." ------- "Isn't the code on the tapes?" I’d wondered why they were sitting out on von Schauss's desk. ------- "Encrypted. The program organizes itself in memory." ------- "So, where are the formulas?" Rachel asked. ------- "In Karl's brain.” Martin stood up abruptly. “Karl keeps a tape recorder in his desk. He wanted a record of his conversations with DEK" ------- Back in the computer room, he showed us the machine mounted under Karl’s desk. It was on, and Martin rewound the tape and played it. They were speaking Russian, but I could make out a lot of it. ------- "...easier with your help, Doctor... pay you well..." A woman’s voice. ------- "Take the tapes, Gloria." Von Schauss. ------- "You’ll tell us now!" A younger man. ------- "No, we’ll take them to Fort Lauderdale and let Christopher deal with it. Bring the tapes." Footsteps and then silence. ------- "They took them to Florida?" I asked. ------- “You know Russian?" ------- "Polish,” I said, “and some German. I understood enough." -------"Then somebody tell me," Rachel demanded and Martin did. ------- "What about the FBI?" I asked. ------- Martin shook his head. "Karl wouldn’t want them involved." ------- "This is our decision, Martin,” Rachel said. “Their lives are more important than a computer program." ------- "Not to Karl. The FBI would turn everything over to the Pentagon, and we might disappear." ------- "I don’t believe it,” I said. “Our own government?” ------- Martin shrugged. "Any government." ------- “Martin, there’s something you should know.” Rachel told him about the money and the FBI man. Martin didn’t seem surprised. ------- "I'll look for them myself," she said. ------- "Let's talk about it on the way to Florida." ------- "Bill, this is my problem." ------- "Sounds like everybody's," I said. "I’d like to go with you, if you'll let me. And I know a guy who could help. Cookie was in the Special Forces until they bounced him. He's a one-man army." ------- "What do you mean bounced him?" ------- "He's a Negro, a boxer. They got him to fight a racist first lieutenant. The guy was a pro and thought he’d take Cookie apart, but Cook broke his jaw. He said he was lucky they kept it quiet. You'd like him. He used to chase the poker game out of the barracks and play his Vivaldi records." ------- "You think he'd help?" ------- “I’ll ask,” I said. “He'd even the odds." ------- -------Cookie was all for it. He’d have come in for kicks, but Rachel insisted on $500 and expenses. He'd meet us at the airport in Atlanta, and we could drive to Fort Lauderdale the next day. I said we were in a hurry, and Cookie said we'd better get our asses moving then. ------- Martin was coming too. He owed his life to Karl, he said. ------- "Hey,” I said to Rachel, “we'll find your aunt and uncle. We’ll catch the bad guys, and rescue the secret formulas." I held out my hand, and she gave it a squeeze. ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 7 ------- ------- ------- It was just a month since Cookie and I had played chess at the Kaiserhof. With a half inch of curly hair, he looked more like the Africans we used to see in Frankfurt than a Georgia farm boy. I introduced Rachel and the doc, and we loaded our bags into a new Buick wagon. ------- "Nice car," Rachel said. "My granddad drove Buicks." ------- "A man of taste. You ride in front." He held the door. Cookie liked to run things. I hoped this wasn't a mistake. ------- "We'll start as soon as you folks rise and shine. Okay with that, Bayonne?” ------- "It’s Rachel’s show, Cook,” I said. They call me Bill." ------- "Yeah? My granddad had a blind horse named ‘Bill.’ You had to watch he didn’t step on you. I'm James Porter Cook on the plantation. ‘Jim’ to you guys. Y'all can fly down if you like. I'll drive the wagon." ------- "We can rent a car in Florida, Jim." ------- "Not like mine," he said. ------- Cookie's mom and dad were pretty hospitable, considering it was almost midnight. His mom said they were glad to have Jim back and proud of his going to art school. Jim and I talked about the Army, and his dad mentioned Kennedy. ------- I wasn't sure a Catholic president was a good idea. I'd had it with nuns ordering me around. ------- Ed Cook was as big as Jim, with broad shoulders and huge hands. I could see the Cherokee in his mom’s face. Some of the Indians owned slaves, Cookie said. ------- "Will this be dangerous," his mom asked. ------- "I don't know, Mrs. Cook,” Rachel said. “I don't want them taking chances." She told them most of it. ------- "I'm glad you trust us, Rachel," Mrs. Cook said. "We can't keep our troubles to ourselves. ------- I saw Martin smile. Jim's mom had gotten it out of him about the camps. ------- Cookie was quieter around his folks, and he seemed to understand that Rachel was in charge. He’d been a good friend in Germany. Besides the cafés and beer halls, we'd gone to concerts and museums and to the Frankfurt opera once. I got a kick out of watching the Germans try not to stare. So I'd asked him to take on the FBI and who knows what else, for a Jewish girl he didn't know. ------- "Time to pack it in," Cookie said. "Henry the Eighth gonna cockadoodle at five." ------- Cookie’s was still a kid's room like mine, except for the paintings. I'd seen his sketches in Germany. They were good, but these were fantastic. There was an oil painting of his great grandfather at a hundred and four. He'd been a slave, Cook said. My grandpop's father worked himself to death on a farm in the Carpathians. ------- A lot of the paintings were sky and water, streaks of blue and green shading to gold where the sun touched the saw grass. He'd done them in the Everglades. It was hard to imagine a paint brush in Jim's hands. As Murray says, things aren't always what they seem. ------- "Rachael’s a prima girl, Bill." ------- "Yeah," I agreed. I didn't want to talk about her. I filled him in on Arizona. ------- "What do you know about computers, troop?" ------- "They’re about the size of a refrigerator,” I said. “You know something?" ------- "Something," he said. Cookie read when he wasn't playing basketball or drinking beer. He’d sit on his bunk in his underwear with a pair of army-issue glasses on his big nose and his head in a book. When you're six four and two-thirty, you don’t worry about how you look. -------"Be a big deal." ------- "So Martin says." ------- "Talk to him." ------- “Night, Cookie,” I said. ------- “Jim, bozo.” ------- ------- I missed the rooster. The sun was up, and everybody was in the kitchen. Jim had on a sports jacket the night before. This morning he wore a khaki jumpsuit, like a uniform. ------- "What you lookin' at, boy? This is your driver." He put on a cap. "We be leavin’ Atlanta for Cracker Country where darkies need reason to ride with white folks. -------“First things first, Bill," he said, when I started to object. ------- "You like the irony of chauffeuring your own car," Rachel said. ------- "Could be. Where you hide something two hundred feet tall and weighs a thousand tons?" ------- "In the forest with the trees." ------- "You’re quick for a little white girl." ------- "We live by our wits, Jim." ------- "And we use our heads to break rocks?" ------- "That's Polacks," I said. ------- Rachel grinned. "How would you know, Mr. Wilkie? Shit, I’m sorry, Bill. I hate it when people tell me I don't look Jewish." ------- "I never think about it,” I said. In Bayonne, we spoke Polish and English like it was one language, but we thought of ourselves as a hundred percent American. My dad was in the marines." ------- "Bunch of wetbacks," Jim said. “Our family was here in Fulton County a hundred years before your guys even heard about the New World. And my dad had to fight in an all-Negro outfit." ------- "Be sweet, Jim," his mother said. ------- "I'm sweet. I’m damned sweet. I’m just saying we've never had an identity problem." ------- Ed Cook laughed. "Three generations on our land is something to be proud of." He was looking at Jim. It was hard for me to imagine Cookie as a farmer. ------- ------- We were on the road by eight. Jim took us through some pretty country. It reminded me of Bavaria except that it was flatter, and the farmers lived on their own land. The Krauts all lived in town, and the fields were so empty you could almost see the wolves. -------Most of the Georgia farmhouses were unpainted, but they had long front porches and were shaded by tall trees. ------- "A lot of sittin'," Jim said. "The scenery even changes, if you’re real patient." He waved his hand at the young plants coming up through the red dirt. ------- His mom had fixed us eggs and sausage, buckwheat cakes, grits, and coffee. We wouldn't be hungry for a while. The Buick had a forty gallon tank, Jim said, because some places the locals didn't like a colored boy with a shiny new car. We’d gas up again when we got to the coast. ------- Martin talked about his research. He worked with Karl on programming languages, but his main interest was pattern recognition. It was all mathematics, he said. ------- Rachel had grown up in the Jersey boondocks out past West Orange. They had a pool and a garden, and she spent summers on Cape Cod. She'd graduated from Smith the year before and was lucky to get the job at Columbia. She was going to start graduate work in history in the fall. A student again, like Bill, she said. ------- We rolled through the Georgia fields at fifty and stopped for lunch at a tourist place in northern Florida. Jim said he'd see us inside, but when he came in he sat with some colored guys. ------- It was nice along the Florida coast. Jim said the light was reflection from the water. I didn't know there were so many different kinds of palm tree. -------Some of the houses had iron balconies covered with vines and were shaded by big live oaks that looked like something from a story book. There was nothing much between the towns except pines and palmetto. -------'Jungle Jim's Reptile Farm'. That any good, do you think?" ------- "I wouldn't know, Bill. I ain’t invited to see the rep-tiles." ------- The underbrush rolled by, like a park, but it was wild. ------- "Lookin' for something in particular, Bayonne?" ------- "Any alligators around here?" ------- Jim laughed. “Boa constrictors handing from the trees. The wildlife’s in Miami.” ------- Jim and Rachel talked. Girls liked him. Some black guys had married Frauleins, which was okay with me, but I wished them luck back in the States. ------- "Why so quiet?" ------- "When am I noisy, Jim?" ------- "You say what you think, like at Grimes' court martial." ------- "You can't let your own guys down for being dumb." ------- "I wouldn't waste esprit de corps on Buddy Grimes. Tell the folks about the man who said 'shit'." ------- "Thanks a lot, Cookie," I said, but Rachel wanted to hear it. ------- “Just a dumb thing that happened at Dix,” I said. “We'd spent a day crawling on our bellies in the snow. It was so cold the hotdogs froze to the mess trays, and you couldn't dent the ice cream with a fork. ------- "It was dark by five, and we were sitting on some bleachers while a sergeant went over what we'd learned. He asked if there were questions, which there never were, but some asshole shouts, 'Question, sergeant!' like we're at West Point. And somewhere in the crowd, another guy says, 'sheeee-yit'. ------- "The sergeant doesn’t hear it, because he's ready to go home, but a gung-ho lieutenant’s come up behind him in the dark and hollers, ‘Who said that?’ The lieutenant starts in on us, about how if the man will take his punishment we can go to chow, and then the sergeant has to get hard-assed too. ------- "The troops start yelling for the guy to give it up, and pretty soon they’re hollering throw the bastard out of the stands, and then they're screaming, 'kill the sonofabitch!' ------- “A half an hour of this, and they march us to chow anyway. We got pushups that night and the next day before they dropped it. Just stupid." ------- Rachel grinned. "It was you, right?" ------- "I was hungry." ------- "Good thing you were with friends." ------- "It was too dark to see," I said, "but nobody would have ratted. The sergeant knew that. It was just an act." ------- "It’s so childish." ------- "That’s the military. You have to bluff the bad guys into thinking you might take them, and if they got more to lose than you, you win." ------- “Diplomacy is the continuation of war by other means." ------- "That's it," I said. "That’s pretty good." ------- "Clausewitz said it, and the other way around." ------- "It’s still cute," I said. ------- ------- It was dark by the time we rolled into Lauderdale. The street lights were on, and the night was soft and sweet with the smell of orange blossoms. ------- Jim suggested the Alhambra Hotel. It was different, he said, and they had decent rooms for the help. ------- "That’s you, huh?" ------- "Give it up, Bill. I don't tell you how to do in Bayonne. Get your rooms and one for the chauffer. The boy here looks like he could use a hand." The porter was a black man in his seventies. "See you in Martin’s room after supper. Try the snapper." ------- The hotel was Spanish style, with a stuffed camel in the lobby and walls the color of Necco wafers. The dining room had a fountain in the middle. ------- “What would you call this?” I asked. -------“I’d call it chutzpah,” Rachel said. ------- The red snapper was good. We had Mackerel on Fridays, but Ma cooked it with onions so you didn’t have to taste the fish. ------- Martin got us a couple of cigars. I let Rachael take a few puffs. ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 8 ------- ------- "Evenin', boss." ------- "What’s in the briefcase?" I asked. ------- "Maps, and an excuse to be up in honky heaven." ------- "Coke, Jim" Rachel said. ------- He pried off the cap with his teeth. -------"Dumb trick. Here's to success. Lets’ find them." -------"Thanks, Jim,” she said. “So, we start with the phone book, Gloria or Christopher, and a Russian name. A long shot, but we'd be dumb not to try it, right?" ------- "A good description of scientific research," Martin said. ------- Rachel tore the directory in four parts. There were Germans and Jews, Italians, Poles, a lot of Spanish, and some I couldn't guess, Greeks or Seminoles. ------- "Gloria Zhukov," Jim said." ------- "Sounds good," Rachel agreed. "Marshall Zhukov beat the Nazis.” She looked at the map. “Shore Drive is on Pelican Key." ------- "The big estates," Jim said. "Kind of place our guys might like. There's a causeway out to Pelican. We'll check it first thing tomorrow." ------- When we finished with the phonebook, Jim and Rachel said goodnight. Martin and I were sharing a room, and neither of us was sleepy, so we talked about computers. ------- We met Rachel for breakfast in the coffee shop. No camels or sombreros, just yellow curtains and white Formica table tops. ------- "You don't often find genuine Smithfield ham on the menu,” Martin said. “It's worth a try." ------- “The real thing always is,” Rachel agreed. ------- ------- The haciendas on Pelican Key were hidden behind high stucco walls and thick foliage. There wasn't a gatehouse, but there were signs about the private security patrol. ------- Twelve-twenty Shore Drive was big. It was surrounded by tall coconut palms on an acre of land. Jim slowed to a crawl as we passed the high wooden gates. ------- "See any dog shit, Bill?" ------- "Guard dog? You learn that in Special Forces?" ------- "Jim chuckled. "Working for a landscaper. We better move along before somebody takes down our Georgia plates." ------- We spent the morning checking names. They didn't amount to anything, so Jim said he'd talk with the service people around town and leave Rachel and me the car. Martin called a friend at the University and was invited to lunch. ------- We found a place near the yacht basin where we could get a sandwich and watch the boats. I liked the idea of cruising along the coast. ------- "My dad always wanted a boat," Rachel said. "It was one of the few things he and Mom disagreed about. Mom likes to argue. She’s good at everything. Before she went to work, she played bridge a lot and won tournaments without trying. It drove serious players nuts." ------- "I'll bet," I said. My mother wasn't even a good cook. ------- "Mom ran charity bazaars and the P.T.A. and did volunteer work at the hospital. I knowwhe was frustrated, but she didn’t take it out on us. When my sister went to college, she went back to school and got her masters in English. She teaches English to foreign students. She likes to invite weird kids to dinner." ------- "Sounds like a tough act to follow,” I said. Mine mom barely read, and she still knows everything." ------- Rachel nodded. "Not that my dad wasn't smart, but he never talked about the office, except some of the people he worked with. He interested in history and archaeology. I miss him." ------- "He wasn't the boss of the family?" ------- "Mom says they were a team." ------- "Ma says Pop's the boss, but she makes the decisions. She goes to Church, which gives her the edge. She says the priests don't know anything about women." ------- "Good for her. What do you think?" ------- "About women? I think they ought to do what they want." ------- "Who gave you that idea?" ------- "Nobody. It’s mine." ------- "Most people think women should stay home and raise kids. Educated people think that, even educated women." ------- "Sure, if they want to,” I said. "I think men are afraid of women taking their jobs. Whose side are you on?" ------- She didn't say anything for a second. We were watching a couple of suntanned kids row an old boat around the marina. ------- "I want kids and I want to be a good mother and a teacher." ------- "Why not. Your mom and dad worked it out." ------- "She didn't go back to school until we were in college." ------- "So what? Why settle for second place?" ------- "Don't ask me," Rachel said. ------- ------- We got lucky at the airport. A guy thought he'd seen Karl and Anna in a white Cadillac with a tall blond couple. He remembered von Schauss's beard. -------“They must have come for them the day my uncle mailed the letter.” ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 9 ------- ------- ------- Martin was eating at the hotel, so we waited for Jin in the lobby. Rachel looked like a kid in her shorts and T-shirt. Jim drove up a few minutes later wearing cut-offs and his chauffeur's cap. ------- "There’s a place at the beach we can get ribs." ------- "I don’t eat ribs," Rachael said. ------- “They got fish,” Jim assured her. -------Just south of town he turned off the highway onto a crushed shell road that wound through the scrub pine and past a trailer camp. ------- "Guess you know where you're going," I said. Jim borrowed a jeep and drive around Heidelberg looking for 'Eintritt Verboten' signs. We got lunch once at a private hunting club and an apology for the war from a guy who looked like Herman Goering. ------- Barbeque and salt air drifted through the windows. A jazz band was playing. Mama Lou's was a rambling outdoor sea food and barbecue restaurant. The only place in Lauderdale where blacks and whites mixed, Jim said. ------- We found a table where we could see the surf, and the owner brought us beers. Business was good, she said. They raised their own hogs and had a fishing boat. She ran her corner of the world and owed nothing to nobody. ------- "They don’t mess with you?" Jim asked. ------- "Not so far, but they want the land." ------- "Hold out for plenty," Jim said. ------- "What I buy with it?" ------- "Peace?" ------- "That what you’d do, boy?" ------- "No," Jim said, “but it ain’t my property.” ------- "Uh huh. You're mighty pretty. You Jewish?" ------- "Yes, ma'am," Rachel said. ------- "I'm Polish," I said. ------- The woman chuckled. "Like one of them jokes. Y’all enjoy your supper now." ------- We finished a platter of ribs, fried fish, and corn bread, and had pecan pie and Jamaican coffee for dessert. It was better than anything I’d eaten in Europe, and it wasn't even for white folks. ------- The night got softer. We couldn’t see the waves until the moon came out and lit the whitecaps. We listened to the band. Good jazz, from somewhere far away. ------- "Time to have a go at Zhukov's," Jim said. "Early enough to poke around without looking suspicious." ------- "Security patrols?" ------- "No problem. I'll swim over and do a recon. Then we can decide what to do." ------- "I'll go with you," I said. ------- "You'd show up like a dead fish, Bayonne. I can say I fell off a boat, and they might be dumb enough to believe it. I just need to see if there's anybody around and if the place is wired. Then we can all go." ------- "You're the expert," Rachel said. ------- We parked near a small marina, across the channel from the house, and Jim stripped to a pair of dark trunks. ------- "Sit together in case the cops come,” he said. I saw him smile. ------- Rachel slid closer, and I put my arm around her. ------- "Smart Cookie," I said. ------- "He admires you." ------- "Yeah?" ------- "He says you're kind to scum." ------- I laughed. "Well, it doesn't cost anything. Cookie's made something of his life. You too." ------- "Me and Eleanor Roosevelt. I have my problems." ------- “What?” ------- She reached up and squeezed my hand. "Lying isn’t one of them, so don’t ask." ------- "They say Mafioso don't lie,” I said. You like your job?" ------- "It'll get me through grad school, if I don't get fired for goofing off." ------- "History, huh?" ------- "Yeah, but it's hard for me to think of myself as a serious scholar." ------- "My grandma says if you take yourself too seriously, you're a horse's ass. She liked me. It's hard to think of myself as anything. I'd like to know French." ------- "The Polish nobility spoke French." ------- "And charged Nazi tanks on horseback. You live on campus?" ------- "Off campus, with a couple other girls." ------- "Got a boy friend?" ------- "I’ve been dating a grad student. A really brilliant guy. We went to a party a couple weeks ago, and Josh lectured for an hour on Machiavelli. It was pretty interesting." ------- "Good party. All we talked about in the Army was sex and cars.” ------- "Girls talk about sex," she said, “and cars.” ------- "Whoa! Take it easy, guys. Sorry to startle you. It looks okay, but it’d be better if Rachel waited here, in case we get picked up." ------- "Martin can bail us out, Jim." ------- “Thought you’d say that.” ------- He opened the rear gate and raised the floor panel. I helped him pull out a canvas bag. He twisted a valve, and a black rubber raft began to fill. A second bag held the paddles. ------- "Told you we'd need the wagon." ------- It took only five minutes to get across the channel. We bumped against a concrete wall in the dark, and Jim said wait until he found the ladder. My stomach was in a knot. We'd been the hunters, but that could change. ------- It was almost pitch black under the pines. I held Rachel's hand, and we felt our way along a path. The breeze covered our footsteps. There was a lawn beyond the trees and a pool and flower garden. I could see the faint reflection off a glassed-in porch. Jim fiddled with the door and slid it open. ------- "Turpentine," I said. ------- I shined the flashlight around. The house was filled with Spanish furniture and brightly colored Indian rugs and pottery. Paintings of birds and flowers covered the walls. ------- Jim checked the signature. "Gloria Zhukov. They're good." ------- A small office held a desk and a wall map of south Florida. There were papers about art shows but nothing personal. ------- "No bills or letters," Rachel said. Nobody’s this neat." ------- A white Cadillac was parked in the three-car garage. ------- "Like the kid said, but kosher Chevys are pretty common." ------- I glanced in the trash barrel. Pop keeps cash in our shop can. There was something stuck to the bottom. ------- "A receipt," I said. "Two hundred fifty gallons of diesel fuel. A boat?" ------- "Probably a forty footer," Jim agreed. "Not that big around here. Nice going." ------- "So we start looking along a thousand miles of coastline?" ------- "Twenty thousand, troop." ------- "Great," I said. "Let me take another look at that map." ------- "The grease spots?" ------- "Where somebody touched it, probably more than once. All our field maps got dirty. Grande Cay isn’t very big big." ------- "Named after somebody called Grande," Jim said. "History’s mostly biography in the South." ------- "Anywhere,” Rachael said. “People make history. Would the islands be a good place to hide out?" ------- "From what I hear,” Jim said. “It's like the old West. You don't want to know too much about your neighbors." ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 10 ------- ------- Business slowed before dawn, Mama said. They swept out the trash and were busy by six. In the morning light, it was a jumble of wooden shacks, scattered among the palms. We sat at the same table and looked out at the white sand and dark blue water. The coffee was strong, and the home-cured bacon and sausage were first rate. ------- Martin had been told about a possible teaching job in Miami. ------- "You had it with the woods?" ------- "I needed the quiet, Bill, but I’m not a hermit. I taught a couple classes at Reimann and did some writing. It was an escape, but I'm ready to live again." Martin looked off at a small boat bobbing on the horizon. ------- Close in, the ocean was calm and pretty as a postcard. Martin had been doing math to shut out the war. There was more anger in some of Jim's kidding now than in the months we bummed around Germany. Rachel... I didn’t know about Rachael. She was wearing a Brooklyn Dodgers T-shirt this morning, and laughing at something Jim said. A rich-bitch college kid who needed us. I didn't believe it. ------- Mama Lu stopped by our table and said something about civil rights. Jim told her we were in Lauderdale on business, and she went away smiling. ------- "She thinks we're smugglers." ------- "And that’s good?" Rachel asked. ------- "For her. The locals don’t want anybody stirring up the darkies." ------- "Which you mean to do." ------- "Not today. We got other fish to fry. I don't blame her for lying low, my folks either, they want to keep what they got. But leave it to Whitey we'd be picking cotton for a thousand years." ------- "You have nothing to lose either?" ------- "Sure I do. I'm integrating the best art school in the South, and my folks have it good. But who else is going to do it? You think the army drafts twenty year olds because they make good soldiers?" ------- "They don’t?" ------- "No, older guys are smarter and tougher, but they have too much to lose. Living gets to be a habit, so we send the kids." ------- I hadn’t thought of it that way, but I didn’t want to die in some jungle, especially as an extension of diplomacy. ------- "Y'all come back," Mama Louise said. ------- ------- It took us an hour to get through Miami. Developments were springing up everywhere, and traffic jammed the highways. There were still places on the west coast, Jim said, where roads and sidewalks ran off into the scrub from back in the twenties, but this time it looked like the boom might keep going. ------- "The keys are strange," Jim said. We were taking it easy along a two lane road that angled towards a point on the horizon. "West Indians and Cubans, crackers, Yankees gone native, and like I said, people on the run. The Bahamians were so poor they ate conch chowder, and now everybody claims to be a Conch. ------- "Truman and Eisenhower gave Key West a boost, but it was always a hangout for wheeler-dealers. The Indians lived here before the Conquistadors brought guns and small pox. The Seminoles had a battle with the Calusas that left the beaches piled with bones. The Spaniards called it Cayo Hueso, Bone Key not Key West. The railroad brought money, and the highway brought tourists and organized crime." ------- "Sounds terrific," Rachel said. ------- "Plus, there's the hurricanes. But just look at it." ------- I was. Light and water everywhere, the ocean and the sky. The long, flat-bottomed clouds were the most solid things in sight. ------- It was mid-afternoon when we crossed a rickety wooden causeway onto Grande Cay. The little island seemed to settle under the weight of the car. Every inch of it was covered with tropical plants and trees. ------- Jim picked O'Hara's Big Easy, because he thought he'd have less trouble getting a bed. And yeah, they had a place for our driver, and he could have supper in the kitchen. I felt like telling her the war was over, and we won. It turned out the O’Haras were from Detroit. ------- Mrs. O'Hara knew the Zhukovs, the wife anyway. Maria Zhukov was the teacher at the island school. "She's quiet," Mrs. O'Hara said. "A nice Cuban lady." ------- I thought Rachel handled it fine about her aunt and uncle visiting the Zhukovs. We left our bag to take a drive around the island before we said too much. ------- "If Maria’s Christopher's wife, who's Gloria?" ------- "Another wife?" Jim suggested. "He gets around." ------- "Maria doesn't seem like a spy," I said. ------- "Anybody can be anything,” Rachael said. “Right Martin?" ------- "And worse," Martin agreed. ------- There were about a hundred houses on Grande Cay, most of them small and all draped with the flowering vines that wrapped the whole island in a green web. Wooden piers jutted out into the bay, and a few of the larger places had deep water docks. The Zhukovs' was one of those. It was a big Victorian, built around the turn-of-the-century for some New Bedford sea captain,” Jim said. A broad porch, overgrown with jacaranda, surrounded the house on three sides. ------- The estate was bordered by a row of tall palms with chalk-white trunks. There were fat cabbage palms beneath them and another kind with feathery fronds that waved in the light breeze. The shrubs and flower gardens looked like a lot of work. It was hard to imagine spies living in a place like this, but Murray and I had been to Berchtesgaden. ------- The dock was big enough for Zhukov's forty footer. There was nothing tied up now except a battered cabin cruiser. ------- A woman wearing a floppy hat was working in the garden. Rachel said to wait in the car. She walked across the lawn, and the woman stood and smiled. Rachel looked pleased and excited when she came back. ------- "Karl and Anna were here yesterday. They've gone on Zhukov's boat. Maria invited us for a drink." ------- "Is that a good idea?" I asked. ------- "I think so," Rachel said. ------- Maria Zhukov was a good looking woman in her late thirties. She seemed glad to see us. Jim hung back, but she waved him in too. ------- The house was as impressive inside as out. The big living room was filled with wicker furniture and potted plants. A grand piano stood in one corner, and low book cases lined three walls. Glass doors along the fourth looked out to the porch and the garden. I recognized more of Gloria's paintings. ------- "I'm sorry I didn't get a chance to meet your aunt and uncle," Maria said. "I saw them playing cards at the boathouse while Christopher was loading supplies. He likes to take business associates in the boat, but he rarely bothers me with them. He said they'd spend a few days at his fishing camp and he'd drop the old couple off in Key West." ------- "Can we get to the camp, Mrs. Zhukov?" Rachel asked. "We really need to find my aunt and uncle." ------- "Please call me Maria, Rachel. The camp is on an island somewhere northeast of here, but I don’t know where, and there are hundreds of them, all pretty much alike. I don't like boats and never go out with Christopher." ------- The old man who brought us our drinks didn't seem too happy. I saw him watching from the doorway. Maria motioned him back into the kitchen. ------- Rachel asked about the school. It was a one-room school house, Maria said. The older children were bused to Marathon or went to boarding schools in Miami. ------- "I have Cubanos, Indians, and blacks in class and even some of the children from the estates. They grow up together and see no difference." ------- "There is no difference," Jim said. ------- "Of course not," Maria agreed. Only money and education." She smiled at Jim. ------- I looked over the Zhukov's books while Maria was talking about her garden, Latin editions of Cicero and Virgil, expensive art books, and children's classics in Spanish and English. ------- Jim saw them too. I'd never heard him talk much about art before, except to answer my questions when we went to churches and museums. Pretty much anything I knew I’d learned by accident, like when I heard a Brahms symphony on the shop radio, because my hands were too greasy to change the station. ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 11 ------- ------- Maria asked us to stay for supper. We couldn't pass up the chance, but we were going in blind like characters in a movie when the audience knows they're asking for trouble. ------- I knew a few Puerto Ricans, but the only Cuban I knew about was Castro. Maria spoke English better than I did. Her first husband had been killed and her father's tobacco business taken over. She'd known Christopher Zhukov when they were students at the University of Chicago twenty years before. He was an anti-Communist, even then. She lost track of him during the war, but he turned up again in the fifties as one of Joe McCarthy’s boys and managed to get her off the island. ------- Zhukov was an American, the son of Russian émigrés. He had a doctorate in classical languages and had been on the faculty at several universities. He was in business for himself now, as an importer of Mediterranean artifacts. The work took him to Europe and the Middle East for months at a time. ------- Maybe she realized was telling us more about her husband than she needed to, because she began talking about her garden. She wanted to show it to us while there was light. ------- We had a tour of the flower beds and the palms and ferns that surrounded the house. Maria and her friends raised some of the tropical plants that were dying out in the keys and transplanted them to land she owned on nearby islands. She told me the names of all the palm trees. Martin went to take a look at the boathouse before he came in to supper. ------- I'd have liked the chowder recipe for Ma, but the cook glared when she stuck her head out of the kitchen. She and the houseman had come with the estate, Maria said, and Christopher kept them on. They looked like a pair of ugly bookends. It was easy to see Maria might like some cheerful company. ------- We ate on the porch where we could see the garden in the fading light, and the smell of flowers and the sea drifted past like we were steaming up a jungle river. ------- "Such a lovely place." Rachel seemed older in the half light of Maria's porch. ------- "We're surrounded by beauty," Maria agreed, "but the islands aren't tame, and the ocean is a wilderness. We lost some palms to a hurricane last fall, although they have shallow roots and can usually be replanted. Like us, Dr. Engel?" Martin nodded. ------- With darkness, a mist began to drift in from the bay. We had our coffee in the living room. ------- "Is Gloria a relative of your husband’s?" Jim was standing before the portrait of an angry parrot. ------- "She’s Christopher's younger sister. We don't see her often." She didn't sound sorry. ------- I hadn't said much. Murray says you can fit in anywhere if other people do the talking. -------"You must be glad to be out of the army," Maria said. Jim nodded. ------- "Yeah," I agreed. “I'm not sorry I went in." Nobody said anything. "I was working at a dead-end job, and the service was hanging over my head, so I volunteered for the draft." I ginned at Jim. “You didn’t know that? It’s why I didn’t complain. After basic it was just a job. The only part I never got used to was that your ass was theirs twenty-four hours a day. ------- "I was lucky to go to Europe, and I got to know some college guys who talked me into going to school. That was the best part, I guess, different guys, from all over, and we got to be friends. Too bad we can't work together like that here." ------- Martin nodded. "We could solve our problems, but people have to find that for themselves." ------- “We can help folks see what needs doing," Jin said. ------- "They’ll see what they want, Jim. The Austrians welcomed the Nazis, and many of them have learned nothing." ------- It was nearly midnight when we left Maria's. ------- "Interesting woman." ------- "Good looking too, Doc." Jim grinned. ------- "She told us about Zhukov," I said, "except where to find him." ------- "She doesn't know," Rachel insisted. "He treats her like a servant." ------- "She may not know," Martin agreed, "or she may be protecting family in Cuba. She knows something's wrong, and she wants to help. She doesn’t trust us yet." ------- ------- The O'Haras were pissed. I guess they'd expected us to pay for dinner. We got another glare when Jim came up to Martin’s room. ------- "We're running out of time," Rachel said. ------- “Turn up something in the morning," Jim said. ------- "We may have what we need." Martin took a deck of cards from his pocket. ------- "I found these at the boat house. Anna and Karl don't play cards. Karl will tell you that games are a safe alternative to life." ------- "You think he used theme to leave a message?" Rachel asked. "How could he know we'd find it?" ------- "Not us, perhaps. And I don't suppose he did expect anyone to find it, but they're survivors. If it’s possible to live without hope, Anna and Karl would do it." Martin was looking through the deck as he talked. "I don't see it, but it’s not a normal deck." ------- We talked while Martin worked. Eventually Rachel went to her room, adn Jim said he'd better hunt up his sack. Martin was still at it an hour later. He didn't seem discouraged. ------- "Maybe they play rummy when you're not around." ------- He shook his head. "Not with these cards. Every card game depends on making sequences, and you see the remains even after you've shuffled the deck. There are no patterns here at all. ------- "The simplest message might be a six-letter word in ASCII, or a longitude and latitude using face value or in binary based on odd and even numbers, but the figures are meaningless. It's there, Bill, and I don't know why he's buried it. It's a principle with Karl to use the simplest method possible. That's good programming." ------- "Uh-huh," I said. "Why wouldn’t it be seven letters, Martin, seven into forty-nine? You said ASCII's a seven digit code." He smiled. ------- "Information is usually transmitted in ten bit units, a start and stop bit, the seven ASCII data bits, and an eighth for error checking. The computer adds a one or a zero to each group, to make even number so you'll know if something went wrong. I left out the start and stop bits, and you're right, error checking isn't needed." He began laying out the cards. "o c h e e, does that sound like anything?" ------- "A breakfast cereal? An Indian name, like Okeechobee?" ------- It took a while to find it. Ochee was a tiny island in Florida Bay, up near Flamingo. ------- ------- When we went down to breakfast, I saw Jim having eggs and grits at the kitchen table. Rachel, Martin, and I ate in the dining room. Mrs. O'Hara asked us about our visit with Maria, but she didn't seem to share Martin’s interest in the Zhukov's garden. ------- We had more coffee on Maria's porch an hour later and watched a cattle egret hunt lizards. The salamanders ate mosquitoes, Maria explained, and the mosquitoes lived off the egrets. -------Rachel wanted to tell Maria the whole story, but Martin pointed out we didn't know what pressures she was under or how she felt about her husband. So Rachael had to remember that her uncle had talked about an island named Ochee. ------- "That’s it,” Maria said. “I heard Christopher mention it to someone. You could take the Jub and go after them. It's my boat. The Snark and the Jub are both mine. Even the house is in my name. Christopher...wanted it that way." ------- I studied the battered cabin cruiser. The hull was a sickly green where the white paint was peeling, and the boat leaned to one side like the junkers at the Bayonne docks. ------- "It's in better condition than it looks. Christopher says it has a shallow draft and is good for fishing in the bay. I wish he'd have it painted, but I think he like to be mistaken for a local fishermen." ------- The Snark and the Jub? I'd read Lewis Carroll to my kid sister. I liked better than she did. It was hard to get a fix on Zhukov. ------- Except for the paint, the Jub was actually in good shape. Inside the cabin was polished mahogany and stainless steel. There were four bunks and a galley. The big diesels put out a lot more power than you'd need to cruise around the bay. Jim said the radio equipment was first rate too. ------- "It’s sure no fishing boat. Listen, Rachel...." ------- "Yeah, Jim?" ------- "I should have asked you, but I’ve got some...military equipment in the wagon. I think it might be smart to bring it." ------- "You should have asked, but bring it. Just remember who’s in charge." ------- "Got it, boss." He grinned. ------- Jim drove the wagon to the boathouse, while Rachel and Martin helped Maria pack food. ------- "Where did you get this?" I asked. ------- "Bought it, most of it. Some was what you might call army surplus. I shipped it to a buddy." ------- "Think they'll let us share a cell at Leavenworth." ------- "They never knew had it, Bayonne. You know how it is. Waste ten times what they use. It all belongs to us citizens." ------- ------- I thought Maria was going to call it off. She was getting cold feet about messing with Christopher, but Rachel talked her around. ------- The fuel tank was full. Zhukov could have made it to Cuba. I started the engines, and Jim untied the mooring lines. We chugged out into the bay, while Maria stood on the dock and waved. I saw the cook watching from the kitchen window. ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 12 ------- ------- "What do you know about boats?" ------- "Nothing," I said, "if you don’t count being seasick." ------- "Martin?" ------- "Sorry, Jim. My grandfather had a sailboat on a lake near Vienna. He was a wonderful old man, a Sanskrit scholar. I went sailing with him because it pleased him.” ------- "I can paddle a canoe, "Rachel said, "It's on you, Jim." ------- He smiled and shook his head. "Don't know diddly, but we’ll figure it out." ------- The Jub was too well equipped to be a sport-fisherman. The engines were new, and there were spare parts and a professional tool kit. Rachel found an up-to-date set of charts. Ochee was fifty miles northwest of Grand Cay. We could run up along the causeway and head north from Matacumbe and never be out of sight of land. ------- The marine forecast called for no change for the next few days. I hadn't thought about it until now. You never see ads for Florida in the rain. A thunderstorm blew up the time Pop and I went fishing and whipped up good-sized waves. I'd never liked the water. There weren't any pools where I grew up. I finally taught myself to swim at the Newark Y until I was seventeen. ------- I held the boat on a steady compass heading, and kept us cruising at at ten knots. Jim said to take our time and not end up on a mud bank. We’d make Ochee by dark. ------- "What's the difference between knots and miles, Martin?" ------- "Eight hundred feet. There are six thousand eighty feet in a nautical mile." ------- "Why?" ------- "Our land mile is based on a thousand Roman paces. 1646 yards, because the pace was measured from the heel of one foot to the toe of the same foot after taking a step or about five feet. That doesn't work on water, so the British admiralty declared a mile to be a radian of one minute, or one 21,600th, of the circumference of the earth, which works out to 6080 feet. Where does the 'knot' come in?" ------- "They let out a rope with knots in it?" ------- "Ja...and...?" ------- "If they count ten knots.... No, they could put the knots every hundred feet and count for a minute." ------- Martin nodded. "In 1637, Richard Norwood calculated knots fifty-one and a half feet apart, for a thirty-second hour glass." -------We saw all the birds I'd seen at the Jersey shore and lots I'd never seen anywhere. Porpoises swam with the boat for a while. We were the tourists here. The flying fish had a better idea what they were doing. I watched them glide hundreds of feet. Cluffy told us about natural selection. Apparently it worked. ------- Jim fixed bologna sandwiches. I ate at the wheel and talked with Rachel about her classes. ------- "What did you mean 'we need you,' on the letter you sent me in Germany?" ------- "I shouldn't have done that," she said. ------- "I wondered." ------- "You sounded honest and straight-forward. Most kids bull-shit about their ambitions and abilities. You said you wanted to learn all you could. A revolutionary idea. I was right. We do need you. ------- “You know, it feels like Spring break." ------- “Uh huh,” I said. I knew what she meant. It was too easy. ------- She pulled her cap over her eyes and leaned back in the seat. I'd never asked if she played sports. I was glad she liked baseball. We’d made it to the playoffs for the first time in history, and then got creamed by West Orange. ------- "The army wasn't so bad?" -------“Is that a question or an accusation? It was okay. I didn’t want it hanging over my head. We had some good times. We laughed all the time in basic. It's easy to forget the bad parts. A lot of time we just stood around. That's how I started reading. Murray gave me a paperback of Lord Jim he found in the barracks." ------- "I’ve never read it. Conrad was Polish." ------- "No shit?" I said. "Well, it was in English. It's about a guy who had a lot going for him until he loses his nerve. Then at the end of the book, he gets his act together, and somebody kills him. I read it in the chow line. I'd read a few pages and tear them out for the buy behind me. Blake had flunked out of Columbia because he wrote all his papers at Yankee stadium. He disappeared just before we left Sill for White Sands. Somebody said the CIA recruited him." ------- "Weird." ------- "It was all weird. Basic training was stupid but fun. It slowed down after that. I remember the first night in the barracks at Sill. It was ten degrees when we left McGuire and in the seventies when we landed in Oklahoma. We went on talking after lights-out. We were all laughing our asses off, and when it got quiet finally, and I just lay in my bunk thinking that I didn't know any of these guys, and I was two thousand miles from home and it was great.” ------- "I know what you mean," Rachel said. "This is the first year I've really been on my own, and I like it." ------- Rachel took the wheel, and I sacked out. It was late afternoon when I woke up. We were moving through some small islands that looked like green blobs, the way they did on the map. ------- Mangroves were survivors, Martin said. They dropped seed pods and sent roots down into the mud. Ten feet tall at the edge of every island and taller farther in, with a few coconut palms in the middle. I wondered how we’d know which one was Ochee. ------- "Some fresh fish beat canned chili?" Jim asked. ------- "You bet," I said. ------- "How ‘bout you get off your butt and catch us some?” ------- “I’m a city boy, Jim.” ------- “Thought you grew up around the docks?” ------- “Yeah, but we got our fish at the market. You can’t eat anything you catch in the Hudson.” ------- “Unless you’re hungry,” Jim said, “and black.” ------- “People got to eat in Bayonne,” I said. “What is this shit, Jim? You’re telling Maria there’s no difference.” ------- “Hell of a difference in how we live.” ------- “Crist, Jim, your folks live better than mine.” ------- “Gentlemen, we’re on the same side,” Rachael said. “Or are we? I heard Malcolm X speak at Columbia. He said some blacks didn't want to mix." ------- "Uh huh," Jim said. “Malcolm says keep away from Whitie, but he takes their money. Dr. King says love the white folks, and don't take their shit.” He'd found the lure he wanted and was tying it to a leader. “This here look like a tasty snapper lure?" ------- Martin said he’d try it. ------- -------Late in the afternoon we anchored a mile from where Jim figured Ochee was. It was hot when we stopped moving. I’d seen a mask and snorkel. Cookie knew about me and water, but he didn’t say anything when I put them on. ------- It was ten feet deep where we anchored, the bottom sunlit along the edge of the mangroves and covered with long yellow leaves that looked like fall. There were fish around the boat and anemones on the bottom. The light made everything gold and green. I swam and floated along the edge of the mangroves until the shadows made it hard to see. ------- "Amazing down there,” I said. “That's the kind of stuff I want to study." ------- "Good," Martin said. "Anemones have all the chemistry and physics for intelligent life." ------- Martin had caught four good-sized mangrove snappers, and I cooked them. It was comfortable when we ate on the rear deck. The sun was low in the west, and the breeze began to cut the heat. ------- The world looked the way it had all day, a few shapes and lines and a million shades of green and blue. The colors changed as the light faded, and the horizon glowed like hot copper beneath low clouds. The islands turned black, and the tall coconut palms were silhouettes against the sky. ------- We'd planned to hit Ochee that night, but there was no moon, something Jim hadn't thought of, and the stars were barely visible through the mist. You could just make out the low shape of the nearest island. We decided to go early in the morning and catch them asleep. ------- Martin read. Jim cleaned and oiled the carbines fed ammo into the clips. ------- "He likes those guns," Rachel said. We were sitting on the foredeck in the dark. ------- "Cookie has his flaws," I said. “Without guns, the man with the biggest club is boss." ------- "Man or woman, but they'd have to catch us first. -------Could you really...'use a knife' on someone? I mean, if you had to." ------- "I don't know," I said. “Let’s hope we don’t find out." ------- "I went camping with my dad when I was ten,” Rachael said. “I did my best to be a boy. We backpacked along the Appalachian trail a few times. He taught me about plants and trees. My dad knew a lot. One time we'd been walking for half an hour when he remembered he'd left his heart medicine in the car. He sat me on a rock to wait and gave me his thirty-eight. He said to shoot anyone who got too close." ------- "Would you have?" ------- "That’s what I don't know. We never told Mom. You’vc heard of Albert Schweitzer?" ------- "A famous kraut,” I said. “He's an organist and theologian and a doctor who takes care of Africans at a hospital in the Belgian Congo. Cookie went to Gunsbach in Alsace to see his church, because he said Schweitzer was the man who rediscovered Bach." ------- "I guess you’ve heard of him. He believed in reverence for life." ------- "Mosquitos and mangrove snappers? He must have killed a few germs. We should live like the Indians, jsut collecting what the earth has to give. Then there wouldn’t be so many of us." ------- "Is that something Murray said?" ------- "Murray? God no, nature wasn't his thing. He grew up in an apartment in Portland. He taught me how to shorten the sleeves on my fatigue shirts." ------- Rachel laughed. "That's more than I could." ------- We stopped talking and listened to the night. Our hands touched, maybe by accident, but just then I heard a dull clank that wasn’t any fish. "Spring break’s over," I said. I stuck my head in the cabin. "Visitors, Cookie." ------- Jim came on deck with night-vision binoculars. -------“There.” He pointed and handed them to me. I saw the boat, glowing like a green ghost. It was a good-sized motor cruiser but not the Snark. Two men were taking the tarp off a heavy machine gun. ------- "Here for us," I said. "Maybe we ought to shoot first." ------- "No," Rachel said. Martin didn't say anything. ------- "We shoot back?" Jim asked. ------- "All right," Rachel agreed. ------- "Keep an eye on them, Bill, and stay down." He was on deck again in thirty seconds with the rocket launcher. ------- "Make it speedy," I said. ------- Jim clipped the glasses to the bazooka and was looking through an eyepiece when the first burst of machine gun fire cut through the cabin over our heads. ------- "Close your eyes," he shouted. ------- There was a loud whoosh, and the darkness in front of us exploded into an orange fireball. I was thrown back against the cabin. ------- Flames flickered for a minute, and then went out. ------- "Better have a look...." Jim's voice was tight. ------- I shined our spotlight on the wreckage and saw a body floating, but there was nothing moving in the water. After a few minutes I started the engine and pulled the boat around to the other side of the island, away from the smell of burning fuel. ------- "Them or us, Jim," I said. "Good shooting." ------- "Yeah," he said. ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 13 ------- ------- "Sorry, Rachel." ------- "No, Bill's right. You saved our lives." ------- Jim let out the anchor, and I cut the engines. I was wondering how many men were on the boat, and hoping the von Schausses weren't with them. ------- We decided to stay put for the night. Jim took the early watch. It was dark, but they'd found us once. Radar Jim thought, although he didn’t know it worked around so many islands. I fell asleep and must have had a dream, because I heard Rachel's voice and felt her hand on my face. ------- I didn't know where I was when Martin woke me at four. I took the watch from four to six. I made coffee and poked Jim awake at five. We let Martin and Rachel sleep. ------- The dawn came up fast, but it was soft and pretty, and the air felt cool. Everything looked new. ------- "Nice day," I said. ------- "Nice as yesterday, be really something," Jim said, but he was smiling. The mangroves were full of white birds with long curved red beaks. ------- "Spoonbills," Jim said. "Not as many as there used to be. A lot of birds nest in Florida Bay, sea turtles too. A safe place, for birds." ------- When it was light enough to see the islands against the sky we headed for Ochee. ------- ------- "It has to be one of those," I said. There was an arc of small islands in front of us, each one a circle of mangroves. I climbed on the cabin, but the islands looked the same, like blobs of dark green pancake batter. ------- "I don't see anything but trees." Rachel had the binoculars. ------- "Wouldn't expect to," Jim said. "Smoke would be a giveaway. The Coast Guard patrols for smugglers, and the Fish and Wildlife Service looks out for the spoonbills." ------- "There aren't many birds on the one to the far right," Martin pointed out. ------- "Good going, Martin," Jim said. "Yeah, it's worth a look." ------- I took the Jub around the little island at five knots, while Jim watched the bottom. Our speed made us an easy target, but we'd be dead ducks if we grounded in the mud. ------- "Look." Rachel pointed towards the shore. I saw the narrow channel angling into the mangroves, thirty feet wide and almost invisible from a distance. I hadn't seen anything like that around the other islands. ------- "Do we go in?" Rachel asked. She sounded a little scared. I wasn't happy about the idea, and Martin didn't say a thing. ------- "I go in," Jim said. He was looking at me. "What Uncle Sam trained me to do, missile man. I'll just have a look. Okay with that, Rachel?" ------- "I guess so, Jim. Be careful." ------- "Uh huh." He pointed to the carbines. "Hang on to those, case something comes out after me." Jim strapped on a knife and slipped over the side. I watched him until he disappeared into the shadows. ------- I showed Martin and Rachel how to switch the carbines to automatic, and I put a rocket in the launcher. Then we waited. ------- Rachel was quiet. I was nervous, but I didn’t think we’d panic if it came to a fight. There was no place to go. Martin was quiet too, but he took the carbine when I handed it to him. I smiled at Rachel. ------- "You okay, Martin?" I asked. ------- He said he was fine. He asked if I wanted to learn number theory while we waited for Jim. I said sure. ------- ------- It was almost an hour before we saw Jim again. Martin was in the middle of explaining why the hexadecimal system was good for computers. We hadn't heard anything except the birds and the wind. ------- "They're in there," Jim said. ------- "My aunt and uncle?" ------- "Sorry, Rachael, not the Snark. Just a dock and some wooden shacks. I saw a couple of guys, but they didn't look dangerous. The bosses may have been on the boat. They had a trip-wire across the channel, which I took care of. We can bring the Jub most of the way in, and Bill and I will try to make a deal. If they'll tell us where the Snark is, we won't have to call in the Coast Guard. Play it by ear. Sound all right?” ------- "Sure," Rachel said. "But Martin and I want to be in on it." ------- Jim nodded. "How about you and Martin do the talking, while Bill and I surround them?" ------- "Fine," she said. ------- I let one engine tick over, and we crept toward the entrance to the channel. The water was black as ink and very still between the dark green walls. ------- "Like the African Queen, Bayonne." ------- "Better not be," I said. ------- The narrow waterway snaked through the mangroves for a quarter mile. The only signs of life were a occasional fish jumping and a few birds in the thick green foliage. I cut the engine, and we drifted for a hundred feet before Jim gaffed a root. ------- "The camp's around the bend. You can talk from here on the speaker when I fire a shot." I didn't say anything. I took a carbine, an ammo bag with an extra clip, and a couple of grenades. I wondered if Jim had mailed them from Dubinhausen. ------- The water was warm and soupy, and it smelled alive. I'd forgotten to ask if there snakes, but I had enough to worry about. ------- We picked our way over the slippery roots, and the channel broadened into a small lagoon. Pretty soon I could see the dilapidated wooden dock and the tin-roofed shacks under the palms. It looked peaceful, but there was a faint chemical smell. ------- Jim pointed to a grove of palms, and I nodded. He went past the dock, towards the palmetto on the far side of the camp. I had a good view of the main building from the trees. There were two small brown-skinned men sitting on crates and smoking. They'd leaned their rifles against the shack. ------- Jim reached cover and waved, and a few seconds later he fired a shot with his 45. It boomed like thunder in the silence, and the men almost fell off their boxes. This was the signal for Martin to start talking. The men had grabbed their rifles and run behind the shack. ------- Martin sounded official, like General Harris shitting the troops. All they had to do was tell us where the Snark had gone, and we'd leave them alone. Otherwise, we'd have to turn them over to the Coast Guard. He didn't say what they were supposed to have done. I guess he figured they'd know. ------- We decided later that none of these guys even spoke English. All they knew was that they were being fired on. An automatic opened up from the palmetto behind the shack, and I dropped flat. He was aiming high, but he knew where I was. Chunks of palm tree were flying off a foot over my head. Jim or I could take a bullet any time, or they'd start firing through the trees at Martin and Rachael. ------- All I thought about was stopping them before Rachel got hit. I pulled the pin on a grenade and let the handle fly. It was maybe sixty yards to the gun, mid-center field to home plate. I counted to five, the way we'd learned in basic, and threw it. ------- A grenade makes an ugly sound, flat and solid. You feel it in your chest. The gun stopped firing. I saw Jim run to the shack and took off but dropped again when there were more shots from the brush. I heard Jim's carbine and got up and ran towards the buildings. ------- "Nobody in the shack," Jim said. "Two guys ran back in the woods. I'll watch them. Take a look inside." ------- There were four bunks but not much else. A steak was starting to smoke on the kerosene stove, so I turned off the burner. There was a half-filled suitcase on a bunk. It looked like they were packing to leave. ------- Jim hollered something in Spanish. Either they didn't speak Spanish either or they didn't like what he said. A couple more shots crackled overhead. I crawled to where Jim was lying behind a low sand hill. ------- "Two rifles. Should be a third man somewhere." ------- "Maybe there were two on the machine gun," I said. “I can go look.” ------- "Too many maybes. We ought to wait 'em out, but we don't have time." ------- "No point in getting killed." ------- "No," he agreed. "Nice throw, Bayonne. Stay down, and I'll try some more talking." This time he got his speech out without being shot at, but nobody answered. ------- Nothing moved except the palm leaves. It was like a jungle and a desert, cactuses poking out of the sand in front of us and a thick tangle of palmetto beyond the clearing. The mangroves blocked the breeze, so it was hot. ------- "I’ll check the gun," I said again, but Jim said to cover him. He crawled off through the brush. I didn't hear anything for a couple of minutes, and then there was a shot. ------- "Cookie?" ------- "It's all right. Stay there." ------- He was back right away. "We can go. I know where the Snark is." ------- "What happened? ------- "There was one guy dead and another near gone. He was gutted, Bill. He wasn't going to live." ------- "Thanks." ------- "I had to tell you, because I shot him. I said if he told us where the Snark was I'd finish him off. I'd have had to anyway. They're meeting a boat tomorrow off the Alligator River on the coast. Rachel's folks are okay, so far." ------- "Good," I said. "Sorry you had to do that, Jim." ------- "Me too. We ought to look in the other shed." ------- "I guess." What I really wanted to do was get out of there. ------- The storage shed was piled high with wooden crates. Jim broke one open. ------- "This stuff has to be worth a lot of money," I said. "Think it'll burn?" ------- "With some help." ------- I got a five gallon can of kerosene from the shack and poured it on the crates. The whole place went up in two minutes, flames thirty feet in the air. Rachel came wading along the shore, and I motioned her down. ------- "It's all right," I called, "but stay low." ------- "Where are they?" She looked off into the trees. ------- "Two of them are dead, and two more took off for the other end of the island. Jim found out what we needed." ------- "The Snark’s meeting a ship tomorrow morning," Jim said, "off the mouth of the Alligator River over on the Gulf coast. They're probably going to hand your aunt and uncle to the Russians, but the man didn't know. I think he was telling the truth," he added grimly. ------- "What's wrong with your leg, Jim? You've been shot!" Rachel was horrified. ------- "No big deal. There's sulfa powder in the medicine kit." ------- "Let’s take care of it," I said. "Your mother’d kill us if you died of blood poisoning." ------- I brought the boat around to the dock. I didn’t think it was his leg that was bothering. ------- "They had us pinned," I said. "They'd have killed us if they could, like the guys on the boat. Should we radio the Coast Guard? They’d have a better chance of stopping the Snark than we do. I know the formulas are a big deal, but..." ------- "Karl isn't willing to trust our government with them." Martin was looking pale, but he sounded calm. "He couldn't decide between publishing his work and destroying it, but he said too many people already knew about it. I'm fairly sure that’s why he asked you to come, Rachel. He must have thought he had time, and you could take the formulas to New York and have them published through Columbia. I know what he and Anna would want us to do." ------- I wanted whatever Rachel wanted, and she was looking at me. ------- "They'd sure want us to give it a try. Why don't you trust the government, Martin? We haven't dropped any atomic bombs lately. Aren't we the good guys?" ------- "In many ways we are. There are few countries in which a former enemy could so easily become a citizen. We're the oldest democracy in the world, and the most successful for our size and complexity, but that's because our system of checks and balances has worked. The government might mean to use Karl's formulas wisely, but we manage power badly, and unlike nuclear weapons, computers can be used without anyone's knowledge. They could let a small group gain control of a population." ------- "Okay, Martin," I said. I started the engines, and we headed back out the channel. ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 14 ------- ------- It was seventy miles to the Ten Thousand Islands. All we had to do was get to the Alligator River by sundown and find the Snark before they found us. ------- Murray says that everyone ends up inventing his own world to make sense of things. Mine didn’t look so great, in spite of the big bowl of pale blue sky hanging over us and the white clouds that ran to the horizon. ------- ------- We reached the mouth of the Alligator late in the afternoon. I'd been keeping as close to shore as I could without grounding. We'd seen a few boats in the inlets, Tarpon fishermen Jim said, but the Gulf coast was almost deserted. ------- Rachel spotted the Snark, anchored well up the river. We turned back and slipped into a creek a quarter mile to the south. ------- ------- "Bread and beans?" ------- "Sure," I said. We ate the beans and watched another sunset. ------- "Time to get ready, Bill. Before they quiet down for the night." It was as dark as it was going to get, and there was no reason to wait, except that I didn't want to go. We'd worked out the plan over the afternoon. Jim's leg wasn't giving him trouble, but it shouldn’t be in the water, so it was my job to sabotage the Snark. I hadn't mentioned being afraid of the water, and I knew Jim wouldn't. ------- Rachel and Martin wanted to come, but Jim and I convinced them I'd be safer with only myself to worry about. We'd found twenty feet of anchor chain on the Jub, and I was going to wrap it around the Snark's propellers. That might not be as easy as it sounded. ------- Martin figured it was the Russians coming for the von Schausses, and the pickup would be a few miles off shore, in international waters. All we'd have to do after we disabled Zhukov's boat was wait until the Reds left and make our deal. ------- The raft sagged under the weight of the chain. Jim showed me how to paddle without making any noise, and I was ready to go with ten minutes of commando training. ------- "Please be careful." Rachel put her hand on my arm. I couldn't see her face in the darkness. ------- "I will," I said, and I meant it. ------- ------- The big rubber raft was hard to manage, but there was no wind and only a light swell on the bay. It was so dark I had to follow the faint black line of the mangroves against the overcast sky. I paddled along the shore and into the mouth of the river. The air was very still in the channel and hotter than on the open water. The frogs and insects made a dim that would cover any sounds I made. I hoped they were frogs, and not gators. ------- I saw the lights, and as I got closer I could hear a country music station. We'd been sure the men on the other boat would have radioed Zhukov before they attacked us, but maybe they’d tried to handle it on their own, and the crew of the Snark didn't know. I hadn't seen a radio at the shack. It made sense they'd do their talking from the boats. ------- There was only twenty feet of open water to cross before I'd be hidden beneath the Snark's stern. I don't believe in luck, but if anything was owed the Wilkies for cheating Grandpop out of a long life, this would be the time. ------- I eased out of the raft, slowly and carefully. That was the secret, Jim said, a lot more than luck. Letting myself down into the black water was the hardest thing I'd ever had to do. ------- I pushed off from the mangrove roots, and I couldn't feel the bottom. I wanted to climb back onto the raft. There had to be a few alligators in the river, and maybe sharks and snakes, but it was really just the blackness I was afraid of. I was more frightened than when the crazy kid drove me to Grafenwohr in the colonel's car at 90 miles an hour. ------- It was dumb to be afraid of nothing, of just what might be down there. The future was as big a mystery as the dark river, and we kept on plunging into it. But water was different. ------- It was hard work towing the raft. I'd almost forgotten to be afraid by the time I got it to the boat. I felt better, as if the steel hull were going to keep away the swamp creatures. I fished the weighted end of the rope out of the raft and let it down until it settled on the bottom. The channel wasn't more than eight or ten feet deep, shallow for a boat the size of the Snark. I could feel the propellers with my feet. I took a breath and ducked under the water and looped the rope around one of the blades. There was almost no chance they were going to start the engines now, but it wasn't something I wanted to think about. ------- I smelled pipe smoke, and I thought I recognized the smell from the von Schauss's lodge. There was nobody moving on the boat, just the sound of Chet Akins's guitar and some low voices. They were speaking in German, and, from the few words I could hear, they were talking about Egyptian astronomy. Zhukov and von Schauss could probably talk about ancient calendars all night, and in the morning Christopher would hand him over to the Reds. ------- I got the end of the anchor chain over the side and started letting it down slowly. The raft began to lift at the other end, so I had to let it run faster. I held my breath, but nobody heard it. ------- Looping the chain around the blades was slow work, because I had to keep coming up for air. It was twenty minutes before I had it wrapped twice around each prop. ------- It was easier paddling back to the Jub without the weight of the chain, but I took it slow anyway. It isn't over until it's over. ------- ------- "Went okay," I said. ------- Jim pounded me on the shoulder and shook my hand, and Rachel gave me a hug. ------- We moved the Jub close enough to hear if they tried to start their engines, and we settled down to wait. ------- We were talking again, I noticed, although we had to keep it low so our voices didn't carry over the water. Jim and I told some more army stories, and Jim talked about growing up on a Georgia farm. My ideas about farming came mostly from reading the Little House on the Prairie to my sister. I said Jim's childhood sounded more like a family reunion than pioneering in Minnesota. ------- "Pretty much," he agreed. "I thought everyone was a relative, because so many were and we called them all aunts and uncles. I never saw white people except in town, and not many there, so I thought they were albinos like my cousin Pinky, only uglier. Most of my school friends were cousins too. We lived in our own little world. ------- "My folks had more than most, because Dad had saved his army pay and started the plumbing business after the war. They've always helped everybody as much as they could. It's all changing now, but taking care of each other is still something we have going for us. If you grow up with that kind, you can handle a lot of bad shit later on. ------- "I’d heard about the Klan, although there was more of that in the next county. They were the boogie men who'd get you if you didn't say your prayers. When I met up with some of them, they seemed like characters in the funny papers, but they weren't really funny, just ignorant and sometimes dangerous. ------- "The brothers I felt really bad for were the ones who went north, because a lot of them lost what little they had. I guess I shouldn't care about the guys we killed," he added. "Drugs are hurting black people more than whites, like it's genocide." ------- "If Zhukov is working for the Russians," Rachel said, "it might make sense for him to deal in drugs. It's the worst kind of sabotage." ------- "Maybe. Too bad drugs and racism aren't a Commie plot, Rachel, because then Mr. Hoover'd be on our side." ------- "I know, Jim, but wouldn't the Communists want to make things as bad as possible, so they could recruit the Negroes to their cause." ------- "Like Paul Robeson? That's a crock. He wanted rights for black people, and that's what scared the government. We have enough folks pushing us around without letting the Communists tell us what to do. You could be right about Zhukov. People do things on principle they might not do for money. Right, Martin? You're not going to light that cigar?" ------- "I’ll just chew on it. Without principles we would live in chaos, but the word itself is empty, like 'quality'. Quality goods.... A man of principle.... Fifty million people died for the Fuhrer Princip, and except for a few martyrs everyone kept silent. In the camps... The irony is that we were taught as children to rely on the government for values to live by. We learned the hard way that you have to make your own." ------- "Make your own values, Martin? Sounds subversive." ------- "Either that or trust someone to choose them for you. ------- "I hope we're doing the right thing now," Rachel said. "It's starting to look like we can pull it off." ------- "Thanks to you." I touched her on the shoulder. The night had grown still again, and the lights of the Snark blinked in the distance. ------- "This would be the first time in my life I've made up mind to do something hard and done it. I'll be really pissed if it’s the short happy life of Rachel Zimmer and friends. ------- "I shouldn't complain. I thought everyone else knew what was best for me, so I did what I was told, ate my crusts, and took care of my little sister. I thought all the rules were equal and part of the formula for a perfect life." ------- ""We're a good team,” Jim said, “and Bill's right. You've done it." ------- "I'm glad you think so. I usually have the confidence of a jelly doughnut, and I'm definitely not a team player. The other kids always seemed to know what they were doing." ------- "It just looks that way," I said. "I ran with a gang for a while. We drank beer and stole car radios. It was a way to putting off growing up." ------- "I know that now, Rachael said. “I had friends in college, and I'd figured out by then that we were pretty much on our own." ------- "Not completely," I said, "not if we don't want to be." She didn't seem to hear me. ------- "Martin, tell me about the camps." ------- "I don't think so, Rachel. It was all bad, but the worst was when you realized you couldn't keep your self-respect. I didn't get sick, and the British troops reached us before they could move us east. I was only twenty-seven when the war ended, but I already felt old. I'd earned my doctorate just before the war, so I was able to make my way to the states by way of Oxford. I met Karl again at Stanford. He'd come out of the war in better shape than I had, and he became like a father to me. That hasn't been an entirely good thing, but it kept me alive. I grew up in a privileged family in pre-war Vienna and spent four years in the concentration camps. I'm still hoping for some useful synthesis." ------- Rachel squeezed Martin’s arm. He was already different changed from the sick old man who'd given us coffee only a few days before. He looked younger with his hair cut and color in his face. It was possible to see him as a scholar and a member of the Austrian nobility. ------- I'd spent a couple of days wandering around Vienna during my last leave. I wanted to have a beer at the café where Brahms ate lunch. It turned out Beethoven lived all over the city. Despite the bombs, it was still a beautiful place. The idea of growing up as a rich kid in Austria seemed as strange as being in a concentration camp. ------- "I saw all those articles you wrote, Martin," I said. It looks to me like you've done a lot." ------- "Mathematics isn't life, but you have to feed your mind or it feeds on you." ------- "No shit. At Fort Sill some of us decided we'd rather have a war than spend two years running electronic tests on guided missiles. Dumb huh?" ------- "Good point," Jim said. "Hitler might have been satisfied if he'd been good enough to get into art school. Too bad Churchill was a better artist." ------- Martin nodded. "The intellectual level of the Third Reich never rose above beer hall ranting. When there is so much death and suffering, you want to make it into something apocalyptic. But it was emptiness, foolish ideas accepted without question and carried to their extreme by my efficient countrymen." ------- "There's another thing, Martin," I said. "We were talking to a sergeant once, about when he was in Korea, and he said he missed the hunting. Somebody asked him what there was to hunt in Korea, and he said, 'people'." ------- "Ja," Martin agreed, "foolishness, and evil." ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 15 ------- ------- "Wake up, Bill, they just blew their engine." ------- Jim was shaking me, and for a second I was back in the army, waiting to be blasted out of my bunk by 'Hillbilly Reveille'. ------- "A lot of noise over on the Snark." ------- "What time is it?" I asked. ------- "A couple minutes after six." ------- I splashed water on my face and took the cup of coffee that Rachel handed me. ------- Things were quiet again. We could hear their auxiliary generator running, but the cabin lights were off. They'd have had a look at their propellers by now. ------- "Maybe we should talk to them before they have time to think it over," Jim suggested. ------- "What if they won't let my aunt and uncle go?" Rachel asked. "We can't shoot them." ------- "Let's hope they don't know that, Rachel." ------- ------- I started the engines, and we moved slowly along the shore to within a hundred yards of the Snark. Two men came on deck with rifles. ------- "Put down your weapons, please." Martin spoke first in English and then again in Russian. ------- "No dice, Martin. We'd better give them something to think about." ------- We crouched behind the cabin, and Jim fired a rocket into the mangroves on the far side of the river. The men with rifles went back inside. ------- "You have ten minutes to hand over the von Schauses," Martin continued. Jim had suggested we play it as hijackers. ------- There was silence, and then a man slid a rubber raft over the side. That looked promising, but ten minutes passed, and nothing more happened. ------- "They're calling our, bluff," Jim said. "You want me to get the Coast Guard, Rachel?" ------- "Let Martin try once more," Rachel said. ------- Martin told them they had two minutes, but there was still no answer. ------- "All right, Jim. Maybe we should have asked for help before. At least now we know they're safe." ------- We'd decided to give the Coast Guard our position and tell them that the Snark was having engine trouble. We figured Zhukov would have to let the von Schausses go, and there'd be a chance we could keep the whole thing quiet. I glanced out at the Gulf, where the early morning mist was clearing off. ------- "Oh shit." ------- Jim took the binoculars and looked where I was pointing. A big trawler was coming our way fast. ------- "The Russians," Martin said. "They must want Karl badly to come so close inshore." ------- "I guess so, Martin," Jim said, "but they're not going to let us sit here and watch. Forget about the Coast Guard Get the raft, Bill, and everybody grab a water bottle and some food. We'll have to hole up the mangroves and hope they don't come after us." ------- That didn't sound good, I could picture our bleached bones, but I heaved the raft over the side and tossed down the carbines and a canteen. The others tumbled in, and I was climbing over the rail when someone shouted from the Snark. A fat guy with a beard had come on deck and was stuggling with another man. ------- "Karl," Martin cried out, and the man hollered something like, "we're loose...", and then it was as if a big flashbulb went off. ------- There were flames all around me when I came up spitting. The Jub was on fire, and the raft was fifty feet away. I swam under water until I was away from the burning fuel and Jim could pull me on board. We paddled back along the shore behind the wall of black smoke and into the mouth of a creek. ------- Rachel looked stunned. ------- "I'm sorry, Rachel," I said. I didn't know what else to say. ------- "It's not your fault, Bill. It’s mine." ------- "No," I said, "we all agreed it was what they'd want us to do." So it was everyone's fault. ------- "We could wait here until they leave," Jim said, "but they might come looking for us. Even if they don't, it could be a while before we're picked up in the Gulf. I think we ought to go up river until we hit the Tamiami. It looks okay on the map. It's ten or fifteen miles, but it would be safer, and we'd be doing something." ------- "Sounds good to me," I said. Better than paddling out into the ocean in a rubber raft. ------- "All right," Rachel agreed. "There's no point in taking chances now." ------- ------- We followed the creek into the main channel of the Alligator and headed north. Nobody was talking. Jim and I took turns, and I watched the river and the woods crawl by. Within a mile, the stream had narrowed to thirty feet, and the mangroves began to give way to a forest of cyprus and long-needled pines. The raft glided beneath the overhanging trees and across sunlit patches of sandy river bottom. ------- We passed dead tree, its white branches hung with Spanish moss and half a dozen vultures. There were noises in the brush, but nothing moved except birds and dragonflies and the needle-nosed garfish that darted a few inches and then hang motionless in the clear water. I hardly noticed the miles, and I forgot how close we'd come to being killed. ------- "Martin?" None of us had spoken for half an hour. ------- "Yes, Rachel?" ------- "What if we made up a story that people would have to take seriously? I mean if you wrote a letter to the newspapers, supposedly from my uncle, saying what his formulas could do and that he was going to publish them in the U.S. and Russia at the same time, as a gesture of peace. Would the papers print that, without him around to back it up?" ------- Martin thought it over for a moment. "If we could give them some of the formulas." He smiled. "We have the two Karl showed me. I can write them from memory, and they would definitely impress the mathematicians. It's worth a try, Rachel." ------- "Let's step it up then, Bill," Jim said. "Nice going, Rachel." ------- ------- We came out of the trees an hour later, onto an endless sea of grass, under a vast expanse of lumpy clouds. I could see the top of a tractor trailer moving across the horizon. ------- "Better toss the carbines," Jim said. "They'll just make trouble." The automatic rifles left a faint trail of oil. I was glad to get rid of them. We beached the raft near a bridge, where we could slog through the shoulder-high reeds to the empty highway. There was a low white building a mile down the road. ------- Rachel's travelers' check satisfied the garage owner's curiosity about tourists without a car and got us a ride to Miami. Martin called Maria from our hotel. She said she’d drive up in Jim's wagon. ------- "How’d she take it, Martin?" ------- "I'm not sure, Rachel. I had to tell her about the kidnapping and about losing the boat, but she said very little." ------- Late that afternoon in our hotel room, Martin told her the whole story, about von Schauss's formulas and their trying to kill us at Ochee, the drugs, and the Russian trawler. -------She said it was worse than anything she could have imagined. Their marriage had been a mistake from the beginning, but Christopher had been good to her family and decent to her. She'd known he was involved in smuggling, but she'd thought it was stolen artifacts and hoped he was helping the counter-revolutionaries in Cuba. She'd never suspected drugs and espionage. ------- She was determined to return to Grand Cay, though, and to go on with her life. It was her home, and she couldn't desert the school children. ------- ------- We left Maria at the bus station the next morning. Martin said he'd call later in the day to be sure she was all right. We took Martin to his friend's house in Fort Lauderdale. ------- Jim wouldn't take Rachel's check. He didn’t want to be a mercenary, he said, even in a good cause. ------- Jim and I hadn't told Martin or Rachel exactly what had happened on Ochee, and we hadn't talked about it. I said to Jim I thought an artist could do more good than a revolutionary, and he said he thought that depended. ------- Rachel didn't blame anyone. We'd done our best, but we hadn't saved the von Schausses or the formulas. We'd left bodies all over the place and would be in trouble if the authorities figured it out. Martin’s letter to the papers seemed like a long shot. ------- We were both pretty quiet on the flight back to New York. It was one of those small planes with stubby wings that look as if they'd drop like a stone if the engines quit. I could see the back of the pilot's head through the cabin door. ------- "We've made a mess of it," Rachel said. “All we can do now is go on with out lives." ------- "Sure," I said. "Win or lose, you start thinking about the next game." ------- "I know. I'm glad I have school to look forward to, even if I'm nervous." ------- "Why nervous?" I said. "You're smart, and you know what you're doing. You don't give up either." ------- "Thanks," she said. She sounded almost surprised. "I don't suppose one more historian is going to change the world." ------- "Didn't somebody say if we don't understand the past, we had to repeat it?" ------- “Lots of people. I don't know, Bill. We don't learn much from our mistakes. You think history’s is important?" ------- "Yeah, I do," I said. "We have to try to understand the past, just to know who we are." ------- ------- It was dark when the plane approached to New York. Manhattan was the bright center of a sea of lights that spread to the horizon. The highways were pale green, like the veins in a frog's foot. It was almost as beautiful as the clouds over Oklahoma. ------- At the East side air terminal she thanked me again and gave me a kiss on the cheek. Said she'd call in a few days. It was a let down, like getting out of the army. ------- ------- ------- Chapter 16 ------- ------- Ma and Pop knew something was bothering me, but they were nice about it. Pop closed the shop for a day, which he almost never does, and we went down the Garden State on a pair of old Harleys and rented a boat to fish the Neversink. ------- Pop knows I don't care one way or the other about fishing. It’s just the only thing we’d ever done together. He gave me a cigars, and he told me a story about the marines that I hadn't heard before. ------- "You almost never was, kiddo." ------- "I guess you got lucky, Pop." ------- He shook his head. "We had good officers. What was lucky was that your Grandpa had kids before he got patriotic." ------- Pop did most of the talking, and I didn't see where he was headed until he finally stopped and looked at me. ------- "You know, Billy," he said, "you and your sister are all Ma and I care about. We're proud of you for going to college, if that's what you want, but we liked you anyway." He gave me one of his little smiles. "We want you to be happy is all." ------- "I know that, Pop," I said. "Thanks. It's not college. College is on, and I'm really okay with it. I'm sorry if I've been a drag. It'll work out." ------- Pop nodded. "Just so you know." His line jerked, and he reeled in a fluke. We looked at it, flapping in the bottom of the boat, and it looked back with its stupid close-set eyes. Pop tossed it in the water, and we went home. ------- ------- Martin called on Tuesday and said to pick up the Times. They’d agreed to publish Karl's article. He was still in Fort Lauderdale, but he'd been down to see Maria. The cook and the houseman disappeared the day the Russians took the von Schauses, and Maria hadn't heard from Christopher. ------- The article was on the front page of the science section. The two formulas were printed in full. They didn't mean a thing to me, but apparently they got the mathematicians excited. Somebody from the Institute for Advanced Studies said von Schauss's discoveries might change history. I had the feeling that the Times was taking this on faith. ------- The article was supposedly written by von Schauss for release after he and his wife were out of the country. There was a picture of him, looking like an angry teddy bear. Rachel had been interviewed in her office at Columbia. She hadn't known about her great uncle's plans, she said, but she thought it was wonderful that he was sharing his inventions with the world. Our government had no comment. ------- Two more days passed. If Rachel hadn't called by the weekend, I'd have to call her. ------- ------- "Telephone, Billy," it's your friend. Ma was smiling. "Hello," I said. ------- "It's me." Her voice was small. "We have to talk." ------- "Sure," I said. "I'll be there." ------- ------- I was relieved, and worried too. Whatever was going to happen with us had to happen now. The subway was passing seventy-second street when I realized I couldn't live without her. ------- The door to Rachel's office was open. She stood up when she saw me, and I just kept going and put my arms around her. Neither of us spoke, but it was okay. I thought I could feel her heart beating. ------- "I missed you," she said finally, like she could hardly breath. ------- "Boy, I missed you too," I said. "I thought about you all the time," which was almost true. A girl looked in the door and grinned. ------- "Well, that’s settled, but there's something else we have to talk about," Rachel said. She picked up a brown envelope from her desk and handed it to me. It was from Howard Jennings, the von Schauss's lawyer. Inside was a note from Jennings and a letter to Rachel from her uncle. Karl had left instructions to send it on to Rachel if ever he hadn't heard from von Schauss for two weeks. Jennings wrote that Anna and Karl were good friends, and that he'd be glad to help any way he could. ------- Karl's letter said that unless he or Anna had been in touch, Rachel shouldn't expect to hear from them again. He had arranged power of attorney for her, and if their deaths could be proved had made her the executer of their estate. ------- There were copies of the von Schauss's wills. Karl's papers were left to Martin, and half of their estate would go to a foundation. Rachel and her sister would share the rest. The land in the San Francisco Mountains was to be Rachel's, five hundred acres of virgin timber. The present house must be destroyed, however, and the site returned to its natural state. ------- "That's crazy," I said. "I thought they really liked the house." ------- "I though so too, Bill. Martin said they'd done a lot of work on it just this year. They like of the woods too, but they aren't fanatics. It’s like the twilight of the Gods. It makes no sense." ------- "Could it be about the formulas, Rachel? There’s a copy in the lodge, and that's why it has to be destroyed." ------- "Why not tell us where it is? ------- "Because we're not supposed to know about it," I said. "Nobody is." ------- "Martin knew, and so does Gloria. Why didn't she have found them?" ------- "Martin assumed they were only in your uncle's head. Probably Gloria did too. If they are in the house, they may be so well hidden no one could find them." ------- "Maybe," I said, "but according to Martin, Karl never makes anything harder than he has to. It could be something simple, like the code he used with the deck of cards, and that's why the house has to be destroyed, so nobody stumbles onto them. But Martin thought maybe he wanted you to get them published." ------- "Then we'd better find them," Rachel said. "Whatever he meant, our best chance of saving their lives is to get our hands on them." ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 17 ------- ------- I wandered around the campus while Rachel finished up at work and started to feel at home. I got up the nerve to go into the big library building, and I found the books on marine biology without having to ask for help. ------- We went to Rachel's favorite deli for supper. The owner really gave me the once over. I guess I passed, because he let us alone after that. We ate and talked and drank coffee until they closed for the night. I got home late, but nobody said anything. ------- ------- I was surprised to get a call from Jim the next morning. He was in New York for interviews at Columbia and NYU. A lot of things had gotten straightened out for him, he said. He wanted to work on a degree in art history. He was staying with relatives, but he hoped the three of us could get together before he went back. ------- I called Rachel, and we arranged to have lunch on Saturday and to go to the Cloisters for the afternoon. This was the medieval branch of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Rachel said. Jim wanted to go. I'd never heard of it. ------- ------- When I got to Rachel's apartment Jim was telling her roommates about raising hogs in Georgia. He always fit in anywhere he was, which was pretty surprising for a guy his size. I watched the girls' while he talked to them in a Georgia drawl and used his big hands to describe the farm. A black man speaking good English makes some people nervous. ------- We had lunch at a Japanese restaurant where you sit on the floor. I had seaweed soup and octopus on wooden skewers. Rachel said they'd give me a fork if I wanted it, but I did okay without one. ------- Jim thought his interviews went well. Columbia had the big scholars, but N.Y.U. looked good too, and he liked the Village. It was chicken or steak, he said. He was as happy as I'd ever seen him. ------- Rachel told us a couple of FBI agent had come to see her after the article came out and asked where they could find Martin. She'd told him she didn't know, and they'd left her alone. ------- ------- We took the bus to Fort Tryon and the Cloisters after lunch. It got me that this place had always been here, and I never knew it. I read the labels and asked questions. Neither Jim nor Rachel knew all the answers. ------- "The people who made these walls were different from us," Rachel said. "They saw death around the corner and thought as much about the next life as this one. Possessions weren't as important in the Middle Ages. They lived in mud huts and built cathedrals to please God." ------- "Sounds like Bayonne," I said, “along with the church fairs and bingo." ------- "But they were artists," Jim said. "They knew they were creating beauty, and they signed their work sometimes and used their own face on statues." ------- "Is this place art or history?" I asked. We were leaning on a stone balcony and looking out across the Hudson at the Palisades, which made even Jersey look good. ------- "Those are two ways of talking about the same things," Rachel said. ------- "But this place is a reconstruction of something that never really existed. The buildings came from France and Spain, and the statues and carvings are from all over Europe. In Germany, Jim and I stood in the tower of a ruined castle and looked out at the same bend in the Rhine river that some prince saw eight hundred years ago. Dubinhausen was a real place, even if was mostly cows and sheep." ------- "It's a museum, Bayonne,” Jim said, “but it's a good one, and it's like a textbook. It helps us hang on to history. Something Martin said after you guys left for New York. He said the Holocaust could happen again, because people hadn't changed. He thought the best reason for studying the past was to understand it, because the past is more real than the present. And if people were ever going to change, they needed to know what they are." ------- "Is that what you think too, Jim?" Rachel asked. "I thought revolutionaries liked to re-write history." ------- "I got things sorted out better. Did I tell you my mom took me to hear Dr. King after I got out of the Army. He'd been giving speeches all day, and he didn't even sound tired. He said to do your best, whatever you did, because that's what counted. I thought at first he was just giving the niggers a boot in the ass, but I think now he was saying that being black isn't the point. The only thing that matters is doing what you can." ------- ------- We spent the afternoon in the museum, talking about the paintings and sculpture and the herb garden and the tapestries. I'd gone off on my own and was looking into a little chapel when a woman walked across the tiled floor. I recognized the tall blond that I'd seen the day I first went up to the university. She was still fantastic looking. ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 18 ------- ------- It was mid-afternoon when Rachel and I picked up our rental car in Flagstaff and drove to Martin’s cabin. He never locked it, and he knew people used the place when he was away, but they never took anything except food. He told me where he'd hidden the key to the lodge and what to look for. ------- "All Martin really has is his books and the piano," I said. ------- "I think he's been living like a displaced person since the war," Rachel agreed. He can't be more than forty-five. I thought he was older at first." ------- "Must be what a concentration camp can do to you, if you're lucky." ------- "I guess. Why do we do things like that, Bill." ------- "Fear," I said. ------- "We’re afraid of each other?" ------- "Who else, and of being cheated out of our share of nothing, but you're asking the wrong guy. I just live here." ------- "But you're not afraid?" ------- "Not yet." ------- "Let's never be afraid." ------- "Never's a long time," I said. ------- ------- Martin had said to take the jeep up the utility road that ran along the power lines to the foot of the mountain. It was a steep hike up to the lodge from there, but if anyone were keeping an eye on the place, they'd watch the road. ------- I parked Martin’s jeep in the trees. There wasn't much of a path. I was glad I'd brought my combat boots. Rachel had hiking boots and her legs were as good as mine. We were more than halfway up by dusk. We stopped to eat a candy bar and watch the sun drop behind the dark hills. It was quiet and getting cold. There was something crackly in the air and in the blue-black sky that spread over us. ------- "It feels strange," I said. -------We started climbing again. ------- ------- It was freezing when we got to the lodge. The night sky was clear, and the air seemed clean. I unlocked the front door. The sharp smell of woodsmoke reminded me of when Feszko and I had camped at Stokes and followed the deer tracks in the snow. Nothing had changed inside the lodge. ------- By the time we'd searched the first floor and the computer room we were hungry. Rachel found some steaks in the freezer and another package of Vi's chili. I poked around the basement and brought up a bottle of Chateau Margeau. Murray had ordered that once at a restaurant in Frankfurt. ------- "I believe this is an excellent vintage," I said. ------- We ate the steaks and chili and decided to give up the search for the night. I built a fire in the big fireplace and put an LP of Brahms's violin sonatas on the stereo. I told her about the cabin at Stokes and the deer, and following Brahms around Vienna. We let the fire die down and built it up again, and finally we put some blankets on the floor and curled up in the only warm place in the house. Like Martin said, the night sky was just beyond the fire light. ------- After a while I saw the flames reflected in Rachel's eyes. ------- "Bayonne...." She reached out and touched me, and everything between us began fell away. ------- "I'm not cold now," she said. Her white skin glowed like marble in the firelight. ------- "You don't ever have to be cold." ------- "Ever is a long time." ------- "Not long enough," I said. ------- ------- I woke up in the middle of the night needing to take a leak. I couldn't find the switch, so I felt my way along the hall. Coming back I stopped to pick up the flashlight I'd seen in the kitchen. I didn't turn it on, because I could see the outline of the doorway into the living room. ------- Just as I came through the door I thought I heard something and spun around. There was a spear of flame in the dark. I felt the bullet brush my shoulder. The sound was still rattling off the beams as I took the stairs to the balcony three at a time. ------- There was too much light coming through the windows, so I crouched in the shadows on the first balcony. I was shaking from the cold, and I had nothing with me except the flashlight. I unscrewed the end and dumped out the batteries. ------- I'd wanted the gunman to come after me, and he was coming. I hoped Rachel wouldn’t try anything dumb. ------- I could just make out his shape as he came slowly up the stairs and started along the rail. He had to know about where I was. I wondered what he was waiting for. I didn't miss a throw too often, but there was a lot riding on this one. ------- The battery hit him square in the chest at ninety miles an hour. He grunted and went backwards over the low railing. The lights came on as soon as he hit the floor. Rachel was standing by the switch, holding the fire tongs. ------- The guy was lying on the tile floor where he'd bounced off the big leather sofa, only it wasn't a guy. It was the woman from the Cloisters. It was Gloria, and her hair was spread out around her head like one of Cookie's medieval saints. ------- Rachel kept flipping the switches. The room was flooding with light, and the floor shone like a piece of white paper. I could see for the first time that there was a picture formed by the dark brown tiles. It was a broad river that was flowing toward a distant mountain range, and suddenly I heard Karl's voice calling to us from the Snark, "We're loose, we're loose...", only that wasn't it at all. It was "der Flusse, der Flusse," the river. ------- The lines tan and white diamonds ran back and forth across the floor of the big room, and in that instant I knew what they were. They were thousands of binary numbers in dark and light tiles, Karl's "Diamonds of Memory," and the formulas that had already killed at a half dozen men and had the power to change history. Hundreds of people could have walked across them in the past few years, and Rachel and I had just made love on top of them. ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 19 ------- ------- "Wiggle your toes," I said. The fall had knocked the wind out of her, but she didn't seem badly hurt. She was wearing a heavy jacket and had landed on the sofa. She sat up and put a hand to her chest. ------- "I didn't know anyone was here." I recognized her voice from the tape. ------- "You always shoot first in case it turns out to be somebody you don't like?" ------- "You scared me. I didn't shoot you when I could have." ------- "Maybe," I said. "What are you doing here, Gloria?" That got her attention, but she didn't answer. "Didn't you look for the formulas the last time? You won't find them now. You planning to go on spying for the Russians and get involved in kidnapping and murder?" ------- "We didn't kill anyone," she said. "How do you know all this?" ------- "It doesn't matter, Miss Zhukov," Rachel said. "You must have seen the article in the Times. Either the Russians let my uncle publish his formulas and share credit for them, or my aunt and uncle just disappear." ------- "I'm sorry about the von Schausses. We didn't want them hurt." ------- "What did you think the Russians would do after they got the formulas?" ------- "Christopher said...." She shook her head. "I don’t know. I really am sorry, Miss Zimmer. I haven't heard from my brother all week. I didn't know what else to do, so I came back here to look. I don't want our government to have those formulas." ------- "If you mean the U.S. government, neither do we," Rachel said, "or the Russians." ------- "What are you going to do with me?" ------- "Nothing," I said. “Go back to Florida.” ------- Rachel glanced at me but didn't say anything. Gloria looked surprised and nodded. ------- "I guess we could some breakfast," Rachel said. ------- It was after five. I made coffee and cooked eggs and bacon. Gloria finally asked why we were letting her go. ------- "You didn't shoot Bill," Rachel said, "and I like your paintings. You have better things to do than play spy. Will the Russians expect you to continue working for them?" ------- "They may not even know about me,” Gloria said. “I've just been helping Christopher." ------- "So you could walk away?" ------- "From the Russians, maybe. Christopher said the F.B.I. are after the von Schausses." ------- "I'm sure they are. Just go home and stay out of it." ------- ------- "I hope that was the right thing to do, but I don't know what else we could have done." We'd watched Gloria drive away. ------- "It was the only thing to do," I said. "Maybe she'll go back to painting and maybe not, but we had to get her out of here. We've found the formulas, Rachel. The Diamonds of Memory." ------- ------- It took us hours to record the thousands of ones and zeros. I'd see the tiles in my sleep. But because we couldn't tell where one formula ended and the next began, we had to get it exactly right. ------- I felt uneasy about leaving them for anyone to find. Nobody but me had seen them yet, not even Martin, who could find patterns in anything, but he hadn’t been on the balcony. Someone else would stand in the right place eventually, like the first person who saw the giant stone-age horses in the English fields. ------- ------- We made sandwiches and stopped to eat them halfway down the mountain. The distant line of hills was pink and gray and outlined against the blue sky. The stream made cheerful noises in the woods. ------- "I wish we could stay here," I said, "you and me." ------- "So do I, but we have to finish it." ------- From the place where the utility trail joined the highway we could see several miles along the road towards town. We hadn't seen a car the whole way up, but there was one coming now. We waited in the trees until it went by. The three men in suits didn’t look like real-estate agents. ------- "Maybe we should forget the airport," I said. ------- "Where would we go?" ------- "It's only a couple hundred miles to Las Vegas. Fly to Atlanta from there, and get Martin to come to Jim's?" ------- ------- We went back to Martin’s cabin, and Rachel drove the car to town and left it on the street. I loosened an ignition wire so we could call the rental agency and tell them the car had broken down. ------- "Martin’s jeep runs better than it looks," I said. ------- "Like Martin," Rachel said. ------- Cars put you to sleep with their soft springs and overstuffed seats, but jeeps are all angles and hard metal. The steering is so quick you have to think about it all the time, but at least you feel like you're driving. It's like a Harley for civilians. ------- The sky over Arizona was even bigger than in the Everglades. I watched the rocks and fields of brush and wildflowers. You couldn't be bored in country like this. ------- We didn't want to check into a hotel or hang around the airport, so we stopped at a campground just before dark. I fried the last four eggs and heated a can of corned beef hash. That’s what Pop and I ate when Pop cooked for the two of us. ------- It started to get cold. We rolled up in one of Martin’s blankets. I woke in the middle of the night and looked up at the stars. Jesus, they were bright. I felt Rachel beside me. A coyote yipped somewhere. ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 20 ------- -------We rented a car at the airport and drove to the Cook's farm without calling ahead. ------- Jim came down the porch steps with a smile on his face. He slapped me on the back and gave Rachel a hug, but I could sense there was a problem with our showing up. ------- "Trouble?" I asked. ------- "Oh yeah,” He said. “Come on in. Martin’s here, helping my mom make pies. The F.B.I came to see me at school. They knew about our being in the keys. If they know any more, they’re not saying. I gave them the story we gave the O’briens, which they’ve got to know is trash. No you guys come... Not that I'm not glad to see you." ------- "Thanks," I said. "We brought the formulas." ------- "Oh, boy," Jim said. "Maybe we can hide them in a pie." ------- Martin looked up from a pile of apple peelings. He looked good. ------- "What are you doing here?" ------- "Sorry, Doc." Rachel gave him a kiss on the cheek. "It seemed like a good idea." She handed him the notebook. "Is this what we think?" ------- Martin looked at the first page and nodded. "Where did you get it?" ------- "At the cabin,” I said. It's a long story. I guess the big question is how we’re going to get you out of here." ------- "Better be quick," Jim said. "They're going to take this place apart." ------- "Jim." Jim's mother had given Rachel and me a hug when we came in and gone back to making pie crust. "We need to have a party." Nobody said anything for a couple of seconds. ------- "Sure," Jim said. "A family reunion, like I told you, lots of folks." ------- Jim's mom made some phone calls and put us to work. I'd done my share of KP, but the Army had a machine that skinned carrots and potatoes until they were the size of ping pong balls. ------- By six o'clock there were thirty cars in the driveway, and maybe a hundred of the Cooks' friends and family were wandering around with plates of barbecue. Jim’s cousins wanted to hear about the army. A couple of the girls were pumping Rachel about Columbia. ------- Martin spent the evening working on the formulas. He convinced us we should try to get out together and hide someplace until he got the formulas ready for publication. He needed a few days to finish the job. ------- We went on foot while the party was still big and noisy. The Feds would check cars, but they might not expect us to walk away. We hiked a mile across the dark fields and climbed into the back of a waiting farm truck. ------- Somebody took us into Atlanta, and another friend of Jim's drove us 200 miles to Savannah. The bus trip north gave us a chance to catch up on sleep. ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 21 ------- ------- I sat on the porch swing listening to the wind in the torn screens. It came from the coast without stopping and piled waves against the rocks below the cottage. Jim and Rachel were diving from the old wooden springboard. I turned down Jim's offer to teach me how. ------- "We don't care if you looked like a fool, Bayonne." ------- "Thanks," I said. "I got better things to do." ------- I finished Huckleberry Finn and started on Wiley's Nineteenth Century Studies. We'd had to learn "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" for tenth grade English class. Coleridge seemed to have done most of the thinking in the early nineteenth century. I'd always imagined ideas strung out like fence posts but they seemed to go on forever, and nothing meant much by itself. ------- Martin came out on the porch and said, "Look at this, Bill. Look what he’s done!" and he'd try to explain it to me. ------- Rachel and I rowed to the other end of Purdy pond and along a creek to a bigger lake. The locals called them ponds. Even Bascom was only three miles long, which was small for Maine. ------- There were cottages on Bascom but none on Purdy except ours. Rachel's Aunt owned all the land. She lived in Florida and hadn't been north since before the war, but she was letting us camp in her lake house. ------- On the way up the creek we passed a porcupine sitting on a half-sunken log. It followed us with its tiny eyes but never stopped eating water lilies. We let the wind blow us back the length of Purdy Pond and watched the tall clouds sail across the sky. ------- ------- I got up at five the next morning. I'd found some fishing tackle in the cottage the night before and dug a can of crawlers. Rachel said to row to the middle trolling a worm, and if that didn't get a bite put a sinker on the line and let it down to the bottom. ------- It was still dark when I pulled away from the dock. The shoreline disappeared in fifty feet, and I was alone on the black water in a gently rocking boat. I got a worm on the hook and let the line trail behind the boat. We had plenty of food, but Rachel said the white perch were special. I pulled in a dozen good-sized perch in an hour. ------- They’d flop around in the bottom of the boat for a while and then lie with their mouths gaping. Their scales slowly turned from silver to dull gray. I thought about the men we’d killed. ------- The fog was clearing. You could make out the dark line of trees behind the cottage. I was heading in when I caught a flash of a light at the edge of the woods and an answer from the other side of the house. I rowed back out a hundred yards, waited a few minutes, and then started for the shore again making plenty of noise. I took my time cleaning and scaling the fish down by the rocks. It was fully light by the time I was done. Jim had the coffee going. ------- "You did all right out there, Bayonne." ------- "Up to a point," I said. I told him what I’d seen. ------- "Shit! Well, they haven’t come to get us, so they're probably watching." ------- "We could destroy the formulas and wait,” Martin said. “The delay wouldn't matter except for Karl and Anna." ------- "Then we'd have to go back to the lodge." ------- Martin shook his head. "No, I can write the formulas from memory." ------- “You serious?” I'd seen the pages of neatly printed code. ------- "It's not that difficult. Now that I know what each formula does, I could write them myself. I have to send copies to a half a dozen people before we're safe and Karl and Anna have a chance." ------- “Bill and I should take it ouot after dark tonight,” Rachel said. “Before they realize we've seen them. There's stream that runs from Bascom down to the road at Bristol. If we could get a ride to Brunswick, I have friends at Bowdoin who could help." ------- "They'll go nuts when they see you're gone," Jim said. ------- "It won't matter, will it, Martin, if we can get the copies in the mail?" Martin shook his head. ------- ------- We spent the day reading and swimming in the cold lake and warming up in the sun. I pried open a muscle and found a pink pearl. ------- "Did you know there’s a freshwater pearl from the Passic River in Queen Elizabeth's crown? There used to be a lot of mussels in the river." ------- "No, Bayonne," Jim said. “I didn’t know that.” ------- ------- "You got to get in the water as soon as I switch on the light and be a hundred feet down the shore when I turn it off." ------- "Okay," I said. We’d either make it or we wouldn't. Martin and Jim wished us luck, and Rachel and I dropped down through the hole we cut in the floor boards. We crawled out to where the porch overhung the black water and waited. When Jim switched on the spotlight, we slipped into the lake as quietly as we could. I heard the screen door bang, and Jim hollered something to Martin. A steady breeze kept the waves slapping on the rocks. The moon was down. ------- We were wearing blue jeans and dark shirts, and our faces and arms were blackened with grease and charcoal. We swam slowly along the shore, buoyed up by old life preservers. I towed our dry clothes and Martin’s notebook in a bundle that we'd wrapped in black plastic. I heard Jim again, and the light went out. ------- It took us an hour to paddle down to the creek. There was a slight current flowing here, soe could hold on to each other and let the water carry us around the sunken logs and patches of pond lilies. ------- "Do you think there leeches in here," I asked. I thought of Bogart pushing the African Queen through the grass. ------- “Just little ones, and eels. ------- "We'll try not to upset them," I said. ------- I saw the silhouette of the wooden bridge. We drifted silently beneath it, and the channel opened out into Bascom Pond. Rachel pointed to a cottage. We swam to a dock where a rowboat was tied up with its oars on board. “Renters,” Rachel said. “Locals wouldn’t leave the oars out.” ------- We washed off the charcoal and changed into dry clothes. The Bristol River meandered five miles from the end of Bascom to the town. There was a fair current flowing, but it was midnight before we saw the darkened houses. ------- "The only cars on the road are going to be the feds. Maybe we could borrow one from here in a good cause." ------- "They have dogs and guns," Rachel said. ------- It wasn’t cold, and it was dark enough that the mosquitoes hadn't found us. We walked a mile up the road. There were no lights to reflect from the sky, but the asphalt glowed faintly under dim stars. ------- A single light ahead was a garage, the kind where they keep junked cars. It was closed, and a tow truck blocked the pumps. ------- "A truck like that could be out this time of night, and nobody would think twice about it." ------- "Won’t it be locked?" ------- "Probably, but I went to the right school for that," I said. ------- It was locked, though. I guess nobody steals a tow truck. It took a minute to hotwire the engine. ------- ------- The formulas were in the mail by ten the next morning. Rachel's friend found me a bed in the men’s dorm. We made photocopies of the formulas and mailed them from the college post office. Patty drove us up back up the coast and dropped us off a mile from the lake. She never asked what it was about. ------- Rachel knew a trail through the big trees that dated back to when the Pemaquids had walked it in their moccasins. We got to the edge of the cleared land around the lake house just before noon. There was a big black sedan parked behind Jim's wagon. ------- "What'll we do?" Rachel asked. ------- "I don't know," I said. ------- "We don't know what's happening to Martin and Jim." ------- "What could happen? The feds will just ask questions, like they asked you and Jim before." ------- We sat inside the edge of the trees and watched the cottage for ten minutes. ------- "I have to find out what's going on, Bill. Martin and Jim should know that the formulas are in the mail. You wait here." ------- "I should," I said, "but I'd rather come along. Let's not tell the feds anything we don't need to, okay?" ------- We walked down the hill to the cottage. I hollered from the driveway so we wouldn't startle them. A tall guy in a gray suit stepped out on the front porch and motioned us to come in. It was the man I'd seen in Rachel's office. ------- "Alan Johnson, F.B.I." He held up a wallet and badge. "It's good to see you again, Miss Zimmer. I hear you and Mr. Wilkie went for a walk in the woods." ------- "That’s right," Rachel said. ------- "And evidently you've found your uncle?" ------- "Not really, Mr. Johnson," Rachel said. "I read his article in the Times. So I guess he's safe." ------- "We were discussing that with Dr. Engle and Mr. Cook. I'll be frank with you, Miss Zimmer. We think you do know where your aunt and uncle are and that you can help us find them. You must realize how important it is that his discoveries not fall into the wrong hands." ------- "As I understand the article, Mr. Johnson, he's planning to publish them. That shouldn't cause a problem, should it?" ------- "You know better, Miss Zimmer. Some things are too dangerous to be in the public domain. Nuclear technology for instance. Our country needs Dr. von Schauss's formulas to defend free nations against the international Communist conspiracy. You don't want to endanger your country, do you, Rachel? I doubt the Communists share your uncle's generosity." ------- "I've told you, Mr. Johnson, I don't know any more about this than I read in the article." ------- "Dr. Engle wrote that article, Miss Zimmer. You and your friends have been busy over the past few weeks. You've been in Arizona and Florida, and now we find you hiding in Maine. I'm afraid you're all thoroughly involved, and if it isn't outright treason, it's a very destructive and culpable piece of mischief. It's time you stopped playing games with the federal government. ------- "We know you helped the von Schausses leave the country, and we believe you have a copy of the formulas. The article is a smoke screen, Miss Zimmer, an effort to cover Dr. von Schauss's defection and to embarrass our country. We haven't received his formulas, and we don't expect to. You may still have an opportunity to undo some of the damage you've caused and avoid the worst consequences of your actions. Think seriously about that." He stopped talking and looked sternly at us. ------- Martin and Jim had nodded when we came in and didn't look sorry to see us. They were sitting on the old sofa where Johnson's men could keep an eye on them. ------- "I don't know what we can do to convince you, Mr. Johnson, but the formulas will be in your hands soon." Rachel sounded calm and sincere. ------- Martin visibly relaxed. "You may be right that publishing them will do harm as well as good," Martin said, "but this was von Schauss's decision, not ours. It's one he’s thought about for some time." ------- Martin was sticking with our story. I hoped it wasn't going to land us in prison. I didn't understand why the feds were playing it this way, either. I'd have expected them to take us to the local office of the F.B.I. and question us separately. ------- "How about if we fixed something to eat?" I asked. “I’m hungry.” It was four hours since Rachel and I had had breakfast. ------- "Perch in the ice chest," Jim said. "Martin caught them this morning. Our friends came just a little while ago." ------- "Why don't you do that, Mr. Wilkie, while we continue our conversation. We might all feel better with something to eat." ------- I got busy at the sink, and they went on talking. I thought Johnson was starting to sound more reasonable. Maybe we could trust them with the whole story, but I was leaving that to Martin and Rachel. The formulas would be published now, and they belonged to von Schauss anyway. I hoped the F.B.I. wouldn't charge us with treason for helping him share his work, even in a good cause. ------- I started a pan of sliced potatoes and chopped onions and fixed the fish the way Rachel showed me. They cooked nice and brown when you dipped them in egg and corn meal and fried them slowly in hot oil. ------- The atmosphere lightened up more while we ate. Johnson asked us about ourselves. I didn't see how it could do any harm for him to see we were ordinary loyal citizens, and he seemed to be buying it. He was mostly interested in Martin. He knew Martin was the only one who really understood what this was all about. He was polite and respectful, almost as if he were somebody famous, which maybe he was. He'd written all those articles. ------- "I'm surprised, Doctor Engle, that you're not more trusting of the country that rescued you from the Nazis. You belong to an illustrious group of citizens who found the freedom here to develop their genius. Einstein, Oppenheimer, Fermi. Humanists like Schlieman and Stravinsky. The list is long." ------- He was laying it on thick. I glanced at Martin to see how he was taking it, and Martin was looking at me like he was trying to tell me something. It had to be important. Two years in a concentration camp had made it tough for Martin to put himself on the line, and he was doing it now. It was about something Johnson was saying, about Einstein and Oppenheimer and the others, but I didn't know enough. ------- Johnson asked for a refill on coffee. Martin picked up on the business about famous foreigners and mentioned a few more. I was listening carefully for some clue and trying to keep an eye on him and Johnson. Johnson was matching Martin name for name. It was amazing to me how many famous foreigners had ended up in America. Johnson seemed to know a lot of history. ------- "Got any more of those fish, son?" It was the first time either of the other two agents had said a word. ------- "Sorry, sir." "I'm afraid that's it." ------- "...and they'd eaten every one." Johnson’s words hung in the air for a second, and he smiled and went on with what he'd been saying. ------- "We have some more potatoes if you want them," I said. ------- "I'll take 'em," the man said. So I got up and took his plate. There weren't any more potatoes. So I just scraped a pile of potato peelings and fish bones onto the plate and popped the lid off the big can of black pepper and dumped a lot on top. I took all the pepper I could hold in each hand. ------- I walked back to the table, holding the plate with my thumbs, high enough so they couldn't see what was on it. When I was behind Johnson, I reached over his head and slammed the whole thing in his face. The other two guys each got a handful of pepper in their eyes. I had to heave it at the second man from a couple feet away, but enough of it reached the target. ------- "Guns, Cookie," I hollered, and I threw myself on Johnson. His chair went over backwards, and I came down on top of him. He was strong, but I was younger and heavier. I got to his gun first and slapped him alongside the head hard enough to stun him. I spun around to find Cookie in control. He didn't look happy. ------- "What the hell, Bayonne? Aren’t we in enough trouble?" ------- "You heard the man," I said, "...and they'd eaten every one." Jim looked blank, but Martin was nodding. ------- "You never read Through the Looking Glass? The Walrus and the Carpenter take the oysters for a walk, and they get hungry. I'll tell you about it later. Say hello to Christopher Zhukov." ------- Zhukov was looking less elegant with potato peelings dripping from his expensive suit and a nasty bruise on his jaw. He wasn't talking. ------- "You were on to him, Martin?" ------- Martin nodded. "Most people have heard of Einstein and Oppenheimer. Heinrich Schlieman is well-known as the discover of Troy, but I doubt that one man in ten thousand would know that he was a naturalized American when he made his discoveries, unless he happened to be a classical scholar." ------- "It was a mistake to indulge my affectations," Zhukov said. "Espionage isn't my primary profession. What do you plan to do?" ------- I looked at Rachel. ------- "The same thing we did with your sister." ------- "What about my sister?" I could see Zhukov's hands tighten. ------- "Nothing," Rachel said. "I imagine Gloria's home at her studio in Fort Lauderdale. What we've told you is the truth, Dr. Zhukov. The formulas will be published very soon. The Russians would be wise to let my uncle go and to claim they were in on it all along. You might tell them that." ------- We left them sitting on the sofa, untied and unarmed, and packed our things in the wagon. I followed the others the ten miles into town in Zhukov's sedan. ------- Christopher had taken his defeat calmly, I thought. I hoped he wasn't the kind of nut who'd keep after us, but I didn't think so, and I didn't see what we could do about it, anyway. We couldn't shoot them or turn them over to the F.B.I., so we had to hope they'd cut their losses. We had their handguns, and a couple of automatic rifles from the trunk of their car. ------- Jim asked me to drive. Rachel told Martin and Jim about the lake and getting down to Bowdoin in the tow truck. There was no way of knowing what Christopher and his pals would do now, but we'd done all we could, and logic said it would work out. I reached over and squeezed Rachel's hand. ------- "What are you doing, Cookie?" I asked. I glanced in the rear view mirror and saw him throw something out the window. ------- "Littering. It's probably a federal offense, Bayonne, but the bits and pieces will rust. Maybe you could slow down when we cross the Androscoggin so I can toss the barrels in the river." ------- ------- ------- ------- Chapter 22 ------- ------- I thought it was too good to be true. Ma handed me a letter from the Adjutant General's office a week after Rachel and I got back from Maine. Either they wanted me back in the Army, or I was going to Leavenworth for messing with national security. ------- They didn't waste words. I owed the government $22.50 in excess travel allowance from Brooklyn to Bayonne, New Jersey. A payment schedule could be arranged. Otherwise I’d face a fine and imprisonment. And a firing squad if I didn't pay up. I laughed so hard Ma thought I’d lost my mind. ------- ------- “Would have the wedding at Mama Lu's,” I said. -------"Too hard on the aunts." ------- "A Polish Catholic from Bayonne is enough," I agreed. ------- We’d have the wedding on the Cape, neutral territory where Bayonne and Short Hills could talk about the weather. We planned to spend a few days in Provincetown before Rachel went back to work. ------- We found Jim in the airport lounge, being watched carefully by the other passengers. It was partly his size and partly the packing case. I thought he looked distinguished in a suit and tie. We shook hands, and he kissed Rachel. ------- "I apologize for this," he said, pointing to the box. "It won't be much of a surprise. Gloria thinks it's the best thing I've done." ------- ------- Maria and Martin had flown up together. They were both refugees and knew the value of kindness and honesty each had showed the other. Christopher hadn't reappeared. ------- Martin was pleased how things had gone. An American and a Russian journal were publishing the formulas jointly. The issues were in the mail, and he'd sent pre-prints to a couple dozen colleagues. The genie was safely out of the bottle. ------- "You did it, my dear," Martin said. ------- "We all did it, Doc." ------- Martin was right though. It was Rachel's determination that got us through. ------- The ceremony took fifteen minutes. We'd both wanted to be married in a church or a synagogue. Neither of us was religious, but Rachel said the universe was so unlikely that it had to be somebody's idea, and I thought there ought to be a way to make it up to people like my grandfather. Neither family was going to give in easily, so we went to the local Justice of the Peace. He was a nice old guy. He read a poem about ships, which seemed appropriate, and he slipped in something about Providence, so unless he meant Rhode Island, it was a religious ceremony after all. ------- Both our families had strong feelings about what you did at weddings. We broke wine glasses, and Pop did a polka with Rachel's mom, and everybody had a good time. ------- "Bayonne," Jim waved me to the window. "We got company." Two men in dark suits were getting out of a car. "I'll find Martin," I said. ------- "Doctor Engle? John Scally, FBI. We need to talk, sir." ------- "Now?" Martin asked with a smile. ------- "We'd like you to come with us." ------- "If I must, Mr. Scally, but if it's about Dr. von Schauss's formulas, you must know that ten thousand copies have already been mailed to the subscribers of two major mathematics journals. I could give you an offprint if you’d like. I have some at the motel." -------"Scally couldn't decide whether to be amused or what. "We still need to ask a few questions." -------"Get yourself a plate,” Rachael said. “There’s plenty of food, and Dr. Engel is planning to propose a toast to the married couple and to the country that made him a citizen after they got him out of a concentration camp." ------- Scally decided to smile. ------- ------- "It was a pleasure to meet you, sir," Jim said. He stood in the doorway while the agents went back to their car. Rachel and I took Martin by the arms, and we went back to the party. ------- "What do you see there, troop?" ------- "What?" I said. "I was looking at your painting and thinking how great everything was. It's almost too good to be true." ------- "I expect it is, Bayonne, too good to last. But they can't take it back. As Martin says, the past is always there." He put a hand on my shoulder, one of the few times he'd ever touched me. "I'm glad you like the painting," he said. ------- ------- "Something?" Rachel was standing beside me. ------- "Everything," I said. ------- I looked at Jim's painting again. It hung over the table that held the other presents, including the ikon that Rachel's aunt and uncle had sent from Geneva. There was a pretty watercolor of a pair of cheerful parrots from Gloria Zhukov, and a handsome Greek vase that Jim thought was genuine and that had come without a card. They were all overshadowed, by Jim's painting of a tropical river. It summed up everything I'd seen and felt on the morning we'd paddled up the Alligator into the Everglades. ------- "What's this?" Rachel asked. "They're sweet." ------- I looked at the little pot of tulips which seemed out of place in the middle of the glass and silver and had to smile. ------- "That's Cookie’s," I said. "A private joke." ------- ------- The end -------