this inconvenient time because of the train schedules.'
'Am I to understand that I am getting on a train?'
'You have a few minutes,' the Gestapo man says, pulling back a cuff to divulge a hulking Swiss chronometer. Then he invites himself in and begins to pace up and down in front of Rudy's bookshelves, hands clasped behind his back, bending at the waist to peer at the titles. He seems disappointed to find that they are all mathematical texts-not a single copy of the Declaration of Independence in evidence, though you can never tell when a copy of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion might be hidden between the pages of a mathematical journal. When Rudy emerges, dressed but still unshaven, he finds the man displaying a pained expression while trying to read Turing's dissertation on the Universal Machine. He looks like a lower primate trying to fly an aeroplane.
Half an hour later, they are at the train station. Rudy looks up at the departures board as they go in, and memorizes its contents, so that he will be able to deduce, from the track number, whether he's being taken in the direction of Leipzig or Konigsberg or Warsaw.
It is a clever thing to do, but it turns out to be a waste of effort, because the Gestapo men lead him to a track that is not listed on the board. A short train waits there. It does not contain any boxcars, a relief to Rudy, since he thinks that during the last few years he may have glimpsed boxcars that appeared to be crammed full of human beings. These glimpses were brief and surreal, and he cannot really sort out whether they really happened, or were merely fragments of nightmares that got filed in the wrong cranial drawer.
But all of the cars on this train have doors, guarded by men in unfamiliar uniforms, and windows, shrouded on the inside with shutters and heavy curtains. The Gestapo lead him to a coach door without breaking stride, and just like that, he is through. And he is alone. No one checks his papers, and the Gestapo do not enter behind him. The door is closed behind his back.
Doktor Rudolf von Hacklheber is standing in a long skinny car decorated like the anteroom of an upper-class whorehouse, with Persian runners on the polished hardwood floor, heavy furniture upholstered in maroon velvet, and curtains so thick that they look bulletproof. At one end of the coach, a French maid hovers over a table set with breakfast: hard rolls, slices of meat and cheese, and coffee. Rudy's nose tells him that it is real coffee, and the smell draws him down to the end of the car. The maid pours him a cup with trembling hands. She has plastered thick foundation beneath her eyes to conceal dark circles, and (he realizes, as she hands him the cup) she has also painted it onto her wrists.
Rudy savors the coffee, stirring cream into it with a golden spoon bearing the marque of a French family. He strolls up and down the length of the car, admiring the art on the walls: a series of Durer engravings, and, unless his eyes deceive him, a couple of pages from a Leonardo da Vinci codex.
The door opens again and a man enters clumsily, as if thrown on board, and ends up sprawled over a velvet settee. By the time Rudy recognizes him, the train has already begun to pull out of the station.
'Angelo!' Rudy sets his coffee down on an end table and throws himself into the arms of his beloved.
Angelo returns the embrace weakly. He stinks, and he shudders uncontrollably. He is wearing a coarse, dirty, pajamalike garment, and is wrapped up in a grey wool blanket. His wrists are encircled by half-scabbed lacerations embedded in fields of yellow-green bruises.
'Don't worry about it, Rudy,' Angelo says, clenching and opening his fists to prove that they still work. 'They were not kind to me, but they took care with my hands.'
'Thou canst still fly?'
'I can still fly. But that is not why they were so careful with my hands.'
'Why, then?'
'Without hands, a man cannot sign a confession.'
Rudy and Angelo gaze into each other's eyes. Angelo looks sad, exhausted, but still has some kind of serene confidence about him. Like a baptizing priest ready to receive the infant, he holds up his hands. He silently mouths the words:
A suit of clothes is brought in by a valet. Angelo cleans up in one of the coach's lavatories. Rudy tries to peer out between the curtains, but heavy shutters have been pulled down over the windows. They breakfast together as the train maneuvers through the switching-yards of greater Berlin, perhaps working its way around some bombed-out sections of track, and finally accelerates into the open territory beyond.
Reichsmarschall Hermann Goring makes his way through the car, headed towards the rear of the train, where the most ornate coach is located. His body is about as big as the hull of a torpedo boat, draped in a circus- tent-sized Chinese silk robe, the sash of which drags on the floor behind him, like a leash trailing behind a dog. He has the largest belly of any man Rudy has ever seen, and it is covered with golden hair that deepens as the belly curves under, until it becomes a tawny thicket that completely conceals his genitals. He is not really expecting to see two men sitting here eating breakfast, but seems to consider Rudy and Angelo's presence here to be one of life's small anomalies, not really worth noticing. Given that Goring is the number-two man in the Third Reich-the designated successor to Hitler himself-Rudy and Angelo really should jump to attention and give him a 'Heil Hitler!' But they are too stunned to move. Goring stumbles down the middle of the coach, paying them no mind. Halfway down, he begins talking, but he's talking to himself, and his words are slurred. He slams open the door at the end of the coach and proceeds into the next car.
Two hours later, a doctor in a white coat passes through, headed for Goring's coach, carrying a silver tray with a white linen cloth on it. Tastefully arrayed on this, like caviar and champagne, are a blue bottle and a glass hypodermic syringe.
Half an hour after that, an aide in a Luftwaffe uniform passes through carrying a sheaf of papers, and favors Rudy and Angelo with a crisp 'Heil, Hitler!'
Another hour goes by, and then Rudy and Angelo are escorted back through the train by a servant. The coach at the rear of the train is darker and more gentlemanly than the florid parlor where they have been cooling their heels. It is paneled in darkly stained wood and contains an actual desk-a baronial monstrosity carved out of a ton of Bavarian oak. At the moment, its sole function is to support a single sheet of paper, hand-written, and signed at the bottom. Even from a distance, Rudy recognizes Angelo's handwriting.
They have to walk past the desk in order to reach Goring, who is spread across an equally massive couch at the end of the car, underneath a Matisse, and flanked between a couple of Roman busts on marble pedestals. He is dressed in red leather jodhpurs, red leather boots, a red leather uniform jacket, a red leather riding crop with a fat diamond set into the butt of the handle. Bracelet-sized gold rings, infected with big rubies, grip his pudgy fingers. A red leather officer's cap is perched on his head, with a gold death's head, with ruby eyes, centered above the bill. All of this is illuminated only by a few striations of dusty light that have forced their way in through tiny crevices between curtains and shutters; the sun is up now, but Goring's blue eyes, dilated to dime-sized pits by the morphine, cannot face it. He has his cherry-colored boots up on an ottoman; no doubt he has trouble with circulation in his legs. He is drinking tea from a thimble-sized porcelain cup, encrusted with gold leaf, looted from a chateau somewhere. Heavy cologne fails to mask his odor: bad teeth, intestinal trouble, and necrotizing hemorrhoids.
'Good morning, gentlemen,' he says brightly. 'Sorry to have kept you waiting. Heil Hitler! Would you like some tea?'
There is small talk. It goes on at length. Goring is fascinated with Angelo's work as a test pilot. Not only that, he has any number of peculiar ideas adapted from the Bavarian Illuminati, and is groping for some way to tie these in with higher mathematics. Rudy is afraid, for a while, that this task is about to be placed on his shoulders. But even Goring himself seems impatient with this phase of the conversation. Once or twice he reaches out with his riding crop to part a curtain slightly.
The outdoor light seems to cause him appalling pain and he quickly looks away.
But finally the train slows, maneuvers through more switches, and coasts to a gentle stop. They can see nothing, of course. Rudy strains his ears, and thinks he hears activity around them: many feet marching, and commands being shouted. Goring catches the eye of an aide and waves his riding crop towards the desk. The aide springs forward, snatches up the handwritten document, and bears it over to the Reichsmarschall, presenting it with a small, neat bow. Goring reads through it quickly. Then he looks up at Rudy and Angelo and makes tut-tut-tut noises, shaking his gigantic head from side to side. Various layers of jowls, folds, and wattles follow, always a few degrees out of phase. 'Homosexuality,' Goring says. 'You must be aware of the Fuhrer's policy regarding this sort of behavior.' He holds up the sheet and shakes it. 'Shame on you! Both of you. A test pilot who is a guest in our country, and an eminent mathematician working on great secrets. You must have known that the Sicherheitsdienst
