thought you’d be excited. Especially after what you’ve just said.’
‘Meeting some physicist is not going to make up for this fucking unspeakable injustice, and I don’t see what it’s got to do with anything I’ve just said. But, all right, we may as well hurry along. Lead the way, uxorious Dieter. Oh, by the way, did Heijenhoort come with you?’
‘No, he stayed in Berlin.’
Bailey worked in the Obediah Laboratories. This was a building, Loeser’s favourite yet, that resembled a sort of stone dam built by Aztecs trained at the Bauhaus.
‘Where are all the white coats?’ said Loeser as they went inside.
‘That’s chemistry,’ said Ziesel. ‘Physicists don’t wear white coats.’ He led Loeser down a corridor to a room that was labelled only ‘11’. The door was ajar, so he knocked softly and then pushed it open. ‘Professor Bailey? May we come in?’
‘He just just just left.’
Loeser looked inside. The man who had spoken was standing at the laboratory’s sink, soaping the taps with a washcloth. Loeser could see him in profile, except that he didn’t have a profile, which is to say, his face was a flat plane — his chin and forehead murally vertical, his nose squashed back against his skull, his mouth lipless, his eyes pasted on so far forward that they could have winked at each other sideways. The configuration was unnatural enough that it could surely only have been the result of some grim natal mishap involving a steel table or a concrete floor. He wore baggy grey overalls and had straggly black hair that looked as if it had spent a few days hexagonally loomed across a shower drain before he even grew it.
‘Oh, hello, Slate. Do you know where he went?’
‘Him and Miss Miss Miss Miss Miss—’
‘His assistant, yes.’
‘They went to the the the the basement to get get something from a supply cupboard.’ Slate didn’t look up from the taps as he spoke. Around him, the laboratory seemed surprisingly neat — lots of electrical instruments, lots of notebooks, and a large shape in the centre of the room concealed by a dust sheet, but none of the clutter that Loeser associated with science — except that on one of the desks there was for some reason a toy steam engine.
‘Thank you, Slate,’ said Ziesel.
‘Christ, he’s the sort of person that haunts your dreams,’ said Loeser in German as they went downstairs.
‘He’s a decent fellow, really.’ They turned a corner. ‘Oh, yes, here is Professor Bailey. Are you forgetting your keys?’ Ziesel asked in English.
‘No, the door’s jammed.’ Bailey must have been around forty, but he already had the tinge of late middle age: short, balding, and pot-bellied, he also swayed a little on his feet, reminding Loeser of one of those round- bottomed wooden toys that it is impossible to knock over. He wore a bushy moustache and the lenses of his glasses were so thick that, like an astronomer observing Neptune, he was probably seeing several minutes into the past. ‘Thankfully some younger, nimbler hands have taken over.’
His assistant, a girl with short black hair, had her back to them as she rattled the lock. ‘I think I’ve nearly got it, Professor,’ she said. Her voice was familiar from somewhere.
‘Well done, my dear.’
‘Egon, this is Professor Bailey, one of our most distinguished physicists,’ said Ziesel. ‘Professor Bailey, this is Egon Loeser, an old friend of mine from Berlin. He is very keen to meet you.’
Bailey smiled and shook Loeser’s hand. ‘And why is that?’
‘Well—’ Ziesel started to say.
Just then Bailey’s assistant cried, ‘There!’ as the lock finally submitted. But the steel cupboard door swung open with twice the force she must have been expecting, because there was a weight leaning against it from the inside. She tumbled backwards, and the weight tumbled down, and Loeser saw simultaneously that the girl was Adele and the weight was the man he’d dined with more than once at Gorge’s house. Marsh was dead, and Adele was here, and there was a great messy gash in his chest like an apricot with the stone gouged out, and she’d cut off her beautiful long hair, and the hole was so deep that part of his ribcage must have been demolished, and she looked almost like a grown-up now, and his mouth had drooled a rivulet of blood, and her skin was still as pale as a Berlin winter, and his eyes were wide and unblinking and dead and ghastly with terror, and her eyes were wide and unblinking and alive and gorgeous with shock, and someone shouted, ‘Dear God!’ and it was Adele, it was Adele, it was Adele, it was Adele, it was Adele.
She got unsteadily to her feet, and for a long moment all four of them stood there, silent, as if in a gallery, studying a sculpture they did not understand. Finally Bailey said, ‘Dieter, take Miss Hitler away’ — except it sounded like he’d mispronounced her name — ‘and tell Slate to go for help.’
‘I’ll go too,’ said Loeser. If everyone thought he wasn’t man enough to stay there with the body, then so be it. He couldn’t let Adele out of his sight. So they trooped upstairs, and Ziesel went to find Slate in Bailey’s laboratory, and Loeser went out into the sun with Adele.
‘When I was living in Hollywood,’ she was saying, ‘there was an accident right outside my apartment, I didn’t see it happen but I ran to my window, and some guy had gone through his windshield and into this parking meter and he was wrapped around it like he was hugging it, and then they pulled him off it and…’
‘Adele, it’s me. You can speak in German.’ She didn’t seem to hear him. Slate ran out of the Obediah Laboratories and on past them towards Throop Hall. His gait was lopsided, as if the lawn were sloping steeply under him. ‘There’s so much I want to ask you.’ Loeser himself had never seen a dead body before, but none of this felt real yet — they were all just theoretical particles on a blackboard.
‘Jesus, Egon, not now! Didn’t you see him? How could someone do that to Dr Marsh?’
‘I’ve been looking for you for five years.’
‘You shouldn’t even be here now. You’re nothing to do with CalTech. They’ll want to find out what happened and you’ll get in the way.’
‘But I’ve only just found you!’
Finally, irritably, Adele switched to German. ‘Listen, Egon, if you really want to talk, come back at eleven o’clock tonight. I’ll be in the laboratory.’ Three boys in baseball jackets walked past, laughing as they swapped impersonations of Slate’s stutter.
‘
‘Oh, Mr Loeser, it’s Dolores Mutton. Did you have a pleasant morning at CalTech today? It’s such an interesting institution.’
‘It was not a pleasant morning for anyone. How did you know I was at CalTech?’
‘A little bird told me. I was wondering if you might have been introduced to a particular member of the faculty — Professor Bailey? The physicist?’
‘Yes, I was, actually.’
‘My husband and I would be so keen to meet Professor Bailey. We’re told he’s a magnificent intellect. I know he’s not an exile, but we’d love to have him at one of our receptions. Perhaps you could bring him along next time?’
‘But I’ve only just met the man. We’re not friends.’
‘Still, we’d be so grateful.’
‘I really don’t know, Mrs Mutton. As I said, I’ve only just met the man.’ Loeser could smell his lamb chop beginning to char.
‘I see. Well, perhaps we’ll have a chance to discuss this further. Goodbye, Mr Loeser.’
At night the paths were lit by old-fashioned-looking streetlamps on tall black posts, and sometimes one of these was close enough to a cypress that from a certain angle the post could hardly be seen and the white bulb shone out through the crush of leaves like some hot lactescent fruit the tree had borne. Leaving his bicycle at Throop Hall again, Loeser wandered lost for a while until he found the entrance to the Obediah Laboratories. The door wasn’t locked. He was planning to go straight to room 11 to find Adele, but then something drew him to the basement. Until he went back to where Marsh’s body had been and confirmed that it had been taken away, part of him would feel as if it were still lying there.
