Eisler smiled slightly. “What makes you think that?”
“Karl had a good memory. He recognized someone else from the meetings in Berlin. He recognized you too.”
“You interest me. I wonder whom he saw.” Connolly didn’t answer. “But for once your method has failed you. I never attended meetings. I was in a secret chapter. From the start.”
“Then where did you meet Karl?”
“He was a messenger. Just once, but he remembered.”
“A messenger? For you?”
“Yes, he did some work for us. A good Communist. He must have been sent to meetings to-well, to observe.”
Connolly looked at him in surprise. So Karl had had his secret too. “Karl was a Communist? I thought the Nazis had made a mistake.”
“The Nazis rarely made that kind of mistake, Mr. Connolly. I told you, it was always a war between us. That’s why many of us had to work in secret. Otherwise, they always knew. A mistake-is that what he told your people?” He seemed almost amused.
“But later, in Russia—”
“Yes, that was unfortunate,” Eisler said seriously. “A terrible time. He was foolish to go.”
“As a good Communist?”
“As a Jew. Do you think it was only the Germans—” He stopped, his eyes moving away to the past. “The revolution doesn’t always move in a straight line. It moves and then there are dark times. It was madness then. Shootings. Thousands of people, maybe more. Friends. People informed on their own friends. Yes. You’re surprised I would tell you this?”
“Yet you did all this for them.”
“The idea is right. The country is sometimes flawed. Do you not feel this about your own country?”
“You’re not Russian.”
“The idea lives there now. It doesn’t matter where.”
“So you want them to have the bomb.”
“Don’t you? Have you thought what it will mean to be the only one? Do you trust yourself that much?” He paused. “But, I admit, that is in the future. A philosophical point. I was thinking of this war, nothing more.”
“The war’s over.”
“Yes,” he said slowly. “So, we were wrong? That’s for you to say. My work is over too.”
Connolly stood up, annoyed. “Your work,” he said heavily. “Murder. That’s what we’re talking about. My God, how can you live with yourself?”
Eisler looked up at him, not answering.
“Why?” Connolly said, his voice almost plaintive.
“Mr. Connolly,” Eisler said, “may I suggest we confine our discussion to what-how, if you prefer. The why is my concern. I make no apologies. I did what was asked of me. I could not do anything else. Not now. I was-useful. I don’t think you can know what that means. An obligation. No, even more than that. I would never have refused. But my motives are irrelevant now, so let’s speak of something else.”
His tone, soft and reasonable, seemed a reproach.
“Why tell me anything at all?” Connolly said.
“Why? Perhaps I want to explain myself. Perhaps I am curious.”
“Curious?”
“Yes. To see if the Oppenheimer Principle works. To see what you know.” He paused again, gathering his thoughts. “I like you, Mr. Connolly. Such a passion for truth. You want to know everything. But to understand? I’m not so sure. They’re not the same thing. So this time maybe it’s different. I’ll make you understand. My last student.”
Connolly looked at him, thinking of Emma at Bandelier, then turned to pace in the room, as if he had a pointer in his hand. “So let’s start at the beginning, wherever that is. Your wife, I think. She didn’t just walk down the street. There was fighting all right, but she was part of it. I assume she was a Communist too?”
Eisler nodded. “That is correct.”
“Possibly even before you were,” Connolly said, a question, but Eisler didn’t answer. “Possibly not. But afterward-you were committed then. You had to carry on the fight, or anyway carry on the memory.”
“Mr. Connolly, please. This is psychology, not facts. What is the point? Let us stay with what you know.”
“But you want me to understand it. What was she like?”
Eisler grimaced, looking straight ahead. “She was young. She believed. In what? A better world. In me. Everything. Does that sound foolish now? Yes, to me too. But then it seemed perfectly natural to believe in things. I loved her,” he said, then paused. “It’s too simple, Mr. Connolly, your psychology. She may have been the beginning, yes, but she was not the cause. For that you had to be alive in Germany then, to see the Nazis come. It was bad and then worse and worse. How was it possible that no one stopped them? Did you even know about those things here? What were you, a boy? Can you remember Nuremberg? There must have been newsreels. I remember it very well. The Cathedral of Light. Even the sky was full of them. So much power. They would kill everybody, I knew it even then. And no one to stop them, no one. What would you have done?”
“We’ve been over this before.”
“Yes,” Eisler said, stopping.
“So you worked for the Communists. That must have been lucky for them. A prominent scientist.”
“I was not so prominent then. But it was useful, yes. I knew many people. Heisenberg. Many.”
“So your bosses knew them too. Then you had to get out. And you kept doing the same thing in England.”
“In Manchester, yes.”
“How did it work there?”
“Mr. Connolly. Do you really expect me to tell you that? I made reports. I met with people, I don’t know who.”
“And you told them about Tube Alloys.”
“Yes, of course. Mr. Connolly, would you please sit down? You’re making me anxious, all this back and forth. You can smoke if you like.”
“Sorry.” Connolly sat down, feeling reprimanded, and lit a cigarette. “You don’t mind?”
“It’s Robert’s hospital,” Eisler said with a small smile.
“Then you came to the Hill early last fall,” Connolly continued. “Karl would have known right away. He’s probably the one who got your file-he took an interest in that. But there wasn’t anything there. It’s what isn’t there,” he said aloud to himself. “And Karl knew. You’d done some work together in the good old days. So he asked you about it-he couldn’t resist that-but he kept it to himself. Why, I wonder. Or was Karl still a Communist too? That Russian jail just another story?”
“You are too suspicious. The mirror in a mirror? No, the jail was real. You had only to see his hands. He was never the same after that-certainly not a Communist. He renounced everything. It was not so much—” He stopped, searching. “Not so much what they did to him there, as perhaps the feeling-how can I say it? — that they had renounced him.”
“And the pain didn’t help. A disillusioning experience all around.”
Eisler glanced up at his sarcasm, then looked away again. “Yes, it must have been.”
“So you made him think you felt the same way.”
“Yes, that was very easily done,” he said with a hint of pride. “A matter of the past. You know, Mr. Connolly, when you stop loving a woman you can’t imagine what anyone else might see in her.”
Connolly was jarred by his tone. In the lamp’s small circle he felt, absurdly, that they might be swapping stories around a fire.
“So you’d both seen the light. But nothing in the file-he wouldn’t like that. That’s the sort of thing that would worry Karl.”
“You forget there was nothing in his file either. He could understand not making a point of it here. In a place like this. People are not so understanding-they don’t know what it was like there. Would he have kept his job? It would be natural to let the sleeping dog lie. For both of us. I assure you, he was-sympathetic.”
