Einstein's Secret (3 page)

And “new fact” was a relative term. It usually meant a new secondary or tertiary source rehashing an old fact. Rarely did I find a real new fact. The reality was that not every historical document and record was on the Internet. Plenty of material hadn’t been digitized, uploaded, or indexed. And that meant new facts were hard to come by.

I spent an hour online, then went to the grocery store. I loaded my cart with enough food for two weeks’ worth of dinners. In the checkout line, my iPhone buzzed. It was a text from Eddie.

I need to see you tonight
,
before the clue is gone forever.

As I stared at the text and contemplated my next move, the grocery story clerk finished scanning my items. “Go ahead and swipe your card,” he said.

As I did, I thought about Alex’s warning. He’d called Eddie a nut, which was why I feared getting involved with him. Not because I, too, thought he was a nut. But because I saw that Eddie was a version of me. An academician whose love of research and theorizing had led him down the path to ruin.

And, of the two of us, I was worse. I was the bigger nut. A crackpot. My energy was channeled into an obscure pursuit that no one validated, while Eddie’s was channeled into the far more lucrative fields of fifties memorabilia and commercial archeology.

I wheeled my grocery cart to my car and let this sink in. Did I view Eddie as some kind of buffoon or freak? Or failure?

I didn’t.

And actually, I felt just the opposite. From what Alex had said about him and from talking to him, I could tell he was a smart guy, accomplished in his own right.

I texted him back.
Where do you want to meet?

Chapter Three

Two hours later, I met Eddie at the Corner and we headed to the Caves.

“The Caves are a series of secret carrels under the Lawn,” he said, as we walked across campus. “The Lawn is the original part of UVA. All its buildings were built in the eighteen twenties and designed by Mr. UVA himself, Thomas Jefferson.”

We walked past the Rotunda.

“A hundred years later, in the nineteen twenties, the University built new underground tunnels, the ones that carried steam, water, and power. And they also closed down some of the old ones, including the ones under the Lawn.

“A decade later, a graduate student broke into those tunnels and he and his buddies spent the next year building study carrels down there. Then he turned the privilege of using the carrels into one of UVA’s secret societies. The Cabal. And like most of the school’s secret societies, it’s not so secret.”

“Are you in the Cabal?”

“Yep.”

“You don’t seem like the ‘joiner’ type.”

“I’m not. But this was too cool to pass up. Plus I didn’t have to do anything. There’s no rush or crap like that. You’re invited in by existing members. You’ve got to be a graduate student and you get judged by your academic research. That’s it.”

“So it’s a kind of nerd secret society.”

“Of the highest order.”

“Congrats, then.”

“I got in before my dustup with McKenzie. For a research paper I did on fifties genre films and the American dream.”

That slowed my pace. Films were my dad’s big thing, but I didn’t want to think about my dad. So I didn’t. “How did you keep your carrel after leaving the history department?”

“I’m doing pretty well with research in comp. sci., too.”

I wasn’t surprised, and that made me even more curious about the clue he had.

We entered Grace Hall. The entrance to the Caves was in the basement. “I met Alex because of the Caves,” Eddie said. “He was invited to join in his third year and he lobbied to keep his carrel after he graduated.”

“And the Cabal said ‘yes’ because they liked having a famous professor in their ranks.”

“Yep. But what I don’t get is why Alex needs a carrel anymore. The cash from being a full professor and from his biography is enough to buy him some privacy above ground.”

We took the stairs down to the basement and walked through a corridor lined with storage cages. At the end of the corridor was another staircase leading down to a small sub-basement. The sub-basement looked straight out of the 1800s, when the University was founded. Its stone walls and floor must’ve been part of the original Grace Hall.

The tiny space was empty except for a trap door built into the floor. The door was made of dark oak like something out of a gothic horror movie, but embedded in the oak was a modern electronic keypad.

Eddie punched numbers into the keypad, and I heard a loud click. He then grabbed an iron ring that folded up from the door, pulled the door open, and we climbed down into the Caves using slots carved into the wall.

I was now standing in a narrow tunnel. It was lit, very dimly, by battery-powered lights that ran into the shadowy distance.

Eddie took the lead, navigating down the tunnel, then another, and another. Old, dead pipes ran above us, and stone walls ran alongside. We passed very few doors and, of those, only a few were open, revealing students hunched over computers or books.

“There aren’t that many carrels,” I said.

“They’re spread out for maximum privacy, and there’s over a dozen tunnels down here.”

“Is there Internet down here?”

“Nope. That’s one of the Caves’ best features. You come down here to work, not to surf. There’s no cell phone reception down here either.”

“No wonder Alex likes it.”

We hiked deeper into the labyrinth of old tunnels, so deep that I would never have been able to find my way out on my own. “The University can’t be on board with students coming down here.”

“It’s considered trespassing and a Class One Misdemeanor.” Eddie looked over his shoulder and saw the unease on my face. He grinned. “I mean technically, but they turn a blind eye to members of the Cabal coming down here. The Caves is a longstanding tradition, and UVA is all about tradition.”

We finally arrived at Eddie’s study carrel. He unlocked the door, and I stepped into an eight-by-eight room, furnished with a desk and three bookshelves, surrounded by the Caves’ now-familiar stone walls. Plastic storage boxes, stacked three high, took up the rest of the space.

“Have a seat,” he said, and I sat down in the only chair available. The one behind his desk. Eddie opened one of the plastic storage boxes. “Henry Clavin—How much do you know about him?”

“More than anyone does. Not that there’s much to know.” After I’d read Clavin’s quote about Einstein in
Fame
, I’d dedicated a couple of years to tracking down everything I could about the man.

Eddie pulled a file out of the box. “Tell me what you
do
know.”

No harm in that. “Einstein met him in Princeton in the fifties. I don’t know how he met him. My best guess is that it was on one of those long walks he was famous for taking. That’s when he’d talk to the locals not affiliated with the University. And Clavin wasn’t part of the University. At least, I was never able to find a link. He was born in Maryland. I found a public record of that. But I don’t know when he moved to Princeton or where he lived when he was there.”

“Anything else?”

“I’m sure he wasn’t one of Einstein’s highfalutin friends because he didn’t leave much of a trail in the annals of history.”

“That’s it?”

That wasn’t it. I didn’t tell him the most intriguing thing I knew. But I did give him one more thing. “The last trace Clavin left was in 1970. He died in a car accident.”

“He’s not dead.”

What?
That was crazy talk. I leaned back in my chair, with one thought going through my head. Alex’s warning.
He’s a nut.
My research skills weren’t the best, but when it came to Henry Clavin, they were good enough to confirm that the man was, indeed, dead.

“I’m sure you double-, triple-, and quadruple-checked your sources,” Eddie said. “So I don’t expect you to just take my word for it.”

“I don’t.” Henry Clavin had died in a car accident in 1970. It was documented not only in a newspaper account of the accident, but also in an obituary, a death certificate, and a funeral announcement.

“Two days ago, I found out he was still alive,” Eddie said. He handed me a printout. “This is a newsletter from a place called ‘Inn on the Boulevard.’ It’s an assisted living facility in Rockville, Maryland.”

My eyes went to a headline halfway down the page:
Long-Time Resident Talks About Friendship With Einstein
. In the first paragraph was the name of the long-time resident,
Henry Clavin
. In one quick gulp, I read the four-paragraph story. Clavin was quoted as saying that Einstein was both brilliant and friendly and liked to talk about politics. There wasn’t much more to the story than that.

I immediately started to calculate Clavin’s age. I remembered that he’d been forty when Einstein died, so if he were still alive, he’d be ninety-eight.

But he wasn’t ninety-eight.
He died in that car accident in 1970.

“How’d you find this?” I said.

“Every couple of weeks, I run a search program on unsecured servers in D.C. and its suburbs. The federal government is so huge that there’s a hell of lot of information passing through those networks. I search for keywords associated with two things. Fifties memorabilia or documents dealing with historical figures or events. I find a lot of stuff that way.”

“You mean you were looking for Clavin.”

“No—that was a total fluke. My search flagged the newsletter because there’s an article in there about another resident. He collects movie posters from the nineteen fifties. And the only reason that newsletter was on a government server was that a Commerce Department employee has her mom in that retirement community and she gets their newsletter in her email.”

I looked back down at the newsletter and saw the headline at the bottom of the page,
A Valuable Hobby
. Skimming through the article told me that resident Milt Taylor had collected movie posters as a teen, kept them all, and now believed they were worth thousands.

“I want you to go up there and talk to Clavin,” Eddie said.

I have to focus on UVA and on a real career
was my immediate reaction.
This is a fresh start
.

But Einstein beckoned. “Why are you into this?” I said.

“I wasn’t until I found that newsletter. I’ve dealt in some Einstein memorabilia, nothing of any real value. Just junk like that
Fame
magazine. That’s how I knew about Clavin in the first place. But here’s the weird thing. I stumbled onto that newsletter two days ago, right when the one person who’d be most interested in Clavin moved to Charlottesville—you.”

That had been at the back of my mind since he’d shown me the newsletter. This was one of those coincidences that was so big, you wanted to believe there was a grand synchronicity to life.

And I’d soon learn that there was. Not to all lives, but to lives that were entangled in a special kind of vortex. A vortex that, at that moment in the Caves, I could never have imagined existed.

“Why don’t you go it alone?” I said. “You found the smoking gun.”

“I
will
go it alone if you don’t want to help. But this is all about Einstein’s secret, and you’ve got the home field advantage. If I talk to Clavin, maybe I get the right answers, maybe I don’t. I don’t even know the right questions. But if you’re there, you’ll make the right connections. If you’re there, that little newsletter could lead to a discovery that changes everything we know about Einstein’s work.”

The game was over. Eddie had won. “I can’t go right away,” I said. “I have to meet with McKenzie in the morning. Then Tuesday, I start classes.”

“It can’t wait.”

“Why not?”

“Clavin’s in the hospital with an infection. A bad one. At ninety-eight years old, he might not last another hour, much less another day. That’s why I texted you; this clue might be gone forever.”

I took a deep breath. I didn’t want to confess that my lack of urgency stemmed from wanting to salvage my career. “The odds that Clavin knows what Einstein wrote on those pages are slim. And even if he did know at one time, it was a long time ago, and the odds that he still remembers are even slimmer.”

But under any other circumstances, those odds would have been more than good enough for me.

Eddie stared at me for a few seconds, giving me a look that said,
Come on, really, you’re not curious?

I handed the newsletter back to him, and he put it in the file.

“I’m driving up there to talk him tomorrow,” he said. “I think you’re making a mistake by not coming with me.”

*

As we snaked through the tunnels on our way out of the Caves, an obvious question came to me. “Why’d you bring me down here to show me the newsletter?”

“I keep my valuable stuff down here.”

That didn’t make any sense. “It was a printout. You can print out a million copies.”

“I can’t explain that to you without filling you in on a couple of other things.”

“Go ahead—I’m all ears.”

“I was going to explain it all on our trip to Rockville.”

“Why not now?

“It’s going to take time.”

“Okay, how about answering this question. Clavin’s death was well documented. Was it faked?”

“That’s part of what I wanted to explain on our trip.”

This was getting annoying. “You’re not talking conspiracy, are you?” Asking him that was a not-so-subtle insult. As historians, we both knew that the vast majority of conspiracies were complete perversions of history. Conspiracies were the domain of kooks who created them by taking known facts and adding their own.

“Please. Have more faith in me than that,” he said.

I didn’t press him anymore, which was a good thing. Not that he would’ve explained anything about was going on right then anyway. If he had, it would’ve made a conspiracy look like a rational explanation by comparison,
and
it would’ve made me run as far away from him as possible.

We climbed out of the Caves and exited Grace Hall. I expected him to push me to go Rockville one last time, but he didn’t. Of course, he didn’t have to. It was the only thing on my mind.