In War Times (30 page)

“Okay,” said Wink. “How about—”

“‘Sweet Georgia Brown,’” said Hans. He tapped out the time with his foot and they lit into it, veering and swaying, hitting a few sour notes.

“One more time,” said Sam. “Let’s try the chorus this way—” He played a few notes. They began again.

An admiring crowd crept into the bedroom. At a look from Wink, he and Sam both took off into “Koko,” by far their favorite; each time it was different. They could not, of course, approach the way Diz and Bird did it, not by miles. But it was always new. They stretched it out, taking long solos, devising new call-and-response lines, ending up with a race to the finish and the cliff-hanging ending.

By now the room was packed. The Germans applauded and cheered and slapped them on the back.

“This is living,” said Wink. “This is really living.”

New musical thoughts surged through Sam like wildfire. It was almost like the time of his epiphany, in the mid-1930s, when he’d heard Jimmie Lunceford play “White Heat” on the radio. As Sam played, he was deep in another time, and his choices synched to that time. He worked in quotes from “Jazznocracy.” “Sing, Sing, Sing.” “White Heat,” infusing into them all the ecstasy of hearing them for the first time on the radio.

Then he saw Dr. Hadntz.

She was sitting on the floor in the doorway. She wore a long, patched skirt, the stripes of which must once have been brightly colored but were now faded, and a white cotton blouse. Her hair, now black again, was held back from her forehead by a kerchief. Standing next to her was the old man, the former slave laborer, holding his violin and bow.

Sam nodded to him. He raised his violin and joined in.

Wink faltered for only a second, then met the Gypsy-infused rhythms and notes halfway. Hans, completely stymied, stopped playing. Sam twined his own notes into the garden of sound, which grew from this new strange seed, this melding of musical histories.

The violinist played with fierce abandon, his jazz instinctive and pure. Wink picked up his theme and played it with him for eight bars, in unison. Sam took the final three bars and used them to sweep into a new flight, which nevertheless referred back to the theme! His deep excitement fused into a steady, brilliant glow of certainty. There were no wrong notes, not then, not that night. Together they wove a new harmonic, which reached down to the very foundation of matter, where particles flickered in and out of existence, mirroring themselves elsewhere in absolute perfection, and then created a resonance of unheard, perhaps unhearable notes, which they all nonetheless strove for, and their striving, their thought, called those notes into being like a new world, with new horizons so wondrous that they could only come to life through sound.

It was, truly, a jazznocracy.

When they finally put down their instruments, there was profound silence. It was the kind of silence one sometimes felt in a church or in the wilderness—a living silence, filled with something beyond them all.

The violinist nodded briefly toward Sam and Wink. Hadntz rose, dusted off her skirt, and nodded toward them. “Thank you,” she said.

Then they slid behind a wall of refugees and slipped from the room.

Sam and Wink both put down their instruments and made their way to the door of the bedroom. Running downstairs to the street, they looked up and down.

“They’re gone,” said Wink.

“I’ve seen the man before. He’s one of the people Hadntz rescued at the refugee camp.”

“Damn, he’s good. More than good. He did something to me. Like Biederbecke. Like Bird.”

“Exactly,” said Sam. “And that was Dr. Hadntz.”

“What?”

“The woman with him.”

“No kidding. So she appears, and then vanishes. Doesn’t even speak. Kind of like what happened to you in London, I guess, except that she didn’t leave any new information.”

“Maybe she did.” Sam’s mind still rang with new resonances.

People in the house were again talking, and Hans put on a record in his bedroom, which they heard faintly.

“Is that—”

“Yeah,” said Wink. “Bird.”

Of one accord they went back into the house to see what other riches Hans might have to offer.

Sam’s second visit to the transients’ house, the following week, did not end up quite as positively.

Hans was not there, and Hadntz did not put in an appearance, in spite of his hopes. Wink was on a nearby couch with Elsa, presumably saying the things that young lovers say in such situations. Sam was on his own, seated in an overstuffed chair, sipping beer, and trying to listen in on conversations he only half understood.

A new crowd was there; apparently the population changed pretty rapidly. Several Germans, including one surprisingly young, strong-looking man, sat at a card table playing cards and talking. Sam thought he may have been SS; certainly he was someone who had passed the war in a more privileged situation than the other refugees. Sam heard the word “Adolf” a few times.

Wink stood up. Elsa did too, and put one hand on his shoulder. He shook it off and strode over to the card players and started speaking rapid German.

He was a master of languages, and had easily picked up Platdeutch, the border-town German spoken here, a polyglot of all the nearby countries, modified by the local accent. Now he fired it at them for a good long time. The man stood threateningly before the women next to him pulled him back down into his seat. When Wink was done, after about twenty minutes of harangue, sweat stood out on his forehead.

“What was that all about?”

Wink’s hands shook as he lit a cigarette. “They were wishing that Hitler was back. Saying, in fact, that he’d be back soon, that he’s not really dead. They were talking about how wonderful he was and how the rest of the world destroyed their beautiful civilization. I told them that Hitler is to blame for this whole goddamned mess. That he created a world war and all this misery, and that he was a thug and a criminal and anyone who followed him was an idiot. Europe is in ruins because of him and his fucked-up ideas. How many people are dead? Who knows?” He gulped the rest of his wine. “Come on, let’s go.”

“I want another glass.”

“I said, let’s go.”

“We are the occupiers,” said Sam, “and I think it’s a good idea for us to sit here and occupy this room for as long as we damned well please.”

“That’s the last wine I cart over here. The whole world is wrong and they’re right. It borders on insanity.”

The room was much quieter now, and the Germans were clearly discussing Wink, though in low tones, while occasionally looking over their shoulders at him.

Sam sipped his wine slowly, and Wink did the same, underlining the fact that Hitler had indeed lost the war.

Now that work was dying down as the German surrender took hold, Sam and Wink had time to get to work on the device. They had a clearer idea of what they were doing. Their travels through the technical wasteland of northeast Germany had yielded a lot of electronic loot. In addition, the German chemical industry, highly advanced, provided them with the kind of equipment they needed to refine the chemicals called for when they combined the two microfilm records they had—the papers Hadntz had shown in London, a seeming age ago, and the ones he had photographed in Berlin. They called Keller in to consult on the optical aspects of its creation, but showed him only the tiny segment of plans that he needed to see.

They called it the HD2; the second incarnation of the Hadntz Device.

One evening, Wink looked up from his examination of the papers. “Time for the blood.”

“Did I hear you correctly?” Sam turned down the radio.

“Didn’t you see this? Requires DNA. Which we have, right?”

“So does that moth over there.”

“This is
ours
, bud. We can spit into this solution if we like, but don’t you think that blood is a little more refined?”

“Echoes of Tom Sawyer,” said Sam. “But what’s the lead-up?”

“Remember the theory sections, about her proposed structure of DNA? It seems that there’s proof that it carries our genetic information. I remember a little bit from premed. There’s a discipline called molecular biology.” He frowned. “They’ve been working on this stuff since the turn of the century. But…I don’t know…Anyway,” his voice brightened, “to make a long story short, some genetic material is required and I say it might as well be our blood.”

So they each made a nick in their index finger and squeezed some blood into the clear solution. It swirled slowly and voluptuously through the heavy liquid. Wink picked up the beaker and shook it. “Okay. That’s that.” They’d laid in a supply of brewer’s yeast as a growing medium for whatever was to occur. They’d procured their present cavity magnetron via the local—and exceedingly rich—black market for military goods.

Sam was beginning to think of it as a terribly long, involved cooking project. “It would be a lot easier to build a rocket.”

Wink sighed. “Yeah. I think that’s her point. I wonder how long we wait this time?”

Not long, it turned out. Power raced through the solution, and they both had to look away from the glare it generated, and step back from the heat.

Again, Sam heard the music—possible forays of notes, each suggesting the next, partnered by harmonics so beautiful, so unique, that he had an instant of wishing that he could write them down. Maybe this is what it’s like for Bird, he thought. Rafferty had brought Bird-lore with his record, including the fact that Charlie Parker was too busy thinking to write anything down. The next idea was always building on the last one, or crowding it out, as lightning struck again and again.

The landscapes this present lightning illuminated, though, were once again horrific. As the music faded and vision kicked in, he saw images of death and destruction, mobs rioting, soldiers shooting at random into a crowd. He saw young soldiers of all nations sacrificing themselves for some imagined peace, some longed-for Utopia.

And he saw, in the last moments, Hadntz’s paper, her thoughts, suffusing his mind, and wrenching his future from him.

“What—was that?” asked Wink. He was still leaning on both arms over the table, as was Sam.

“What is this?” asked Sam.

It was a clear, oblong object, about the size of a paperback book.

Wink straightened and crossed his arms. He nodded his head for a long minute, biting his bottom lip. “Good thing we weren’t planning on using the magnetron again. So, did you see the process of how the hell this thing went from some kind of broth to something that seems to have no moving parts?”

Sam shook his head. “Seemed like it only took a minute or so.” He looked at his watch. “Except that we’ve missed lunch and dinner.”

They could only agree that at some point they had become saturated with something—some medium that invaded them, rearranging them as if they were composed of notes. And as if they were modern jazz, their previously predictable notes were taken apart, renewed, and reassembled.

“At least that’s how I felt,” said Sam, as they sat next to the device later that evening. “And afterward, I felt astoundingly refreshed. Still do.”

“It’s rather frightening,” said Wink.

They regarded the product, which had gone from transparent to a milky opalescent-green solid.

“I don’t see anything, anymore,” said Sam.

“Nor hear anything, either.”

“Maybe it’s finished. Done it’s work.
Kaput
.”

Wink shrugged. “Or maybe it’s storing up information. Looking for new targets. Maybe it will swing into action, like the M-9, once it finds something. Like other people. And do the same thing, whatever it was. It was kind of like what I’d imagine hiking to one of those really high mountains might be. Oxygen thin. View infinite.” His voice became gentle; quiet. “Infinite,” he repeated.

They settled on a hiding place for the device: in plain view.

They flipped a coin; Sam lost. Gathering his courage, Sam picked it up. Nothing happened, which was as he had hoped; he was not reassured by the unpredictable effect it had had on them already.

Although they thought of various assays and tests, they performed only those which seemed unlikely to cause it damage. It remained at 98.6 degrees no matter what the surrounding temperature was. It was hard, but not brittle, and smooth as polished aluminum. To Sam’s relief, nothing about it seemed to leap out and into him. He slid it like a book onto one side of the shelf above their work table, a shelf heaped with magnets, wires, screws, oily rags, and the other detritus of mechanics.

The following week, he was loading metal trays on a truck bound for Düsseldorf when Wink punched him lightly in the shoulder.

“Where’s Perler?”

Sam put down his load. “I don’t know. Why?”

“We’ve been robbed.”

Upstairs, Sam beheld a two-foot-square area where a wooden floor used to be. Wink had moved the desk that had covered it to one side.

“How’d he do that?” Sam knelt and looked down. Directly beneath the hole was a boiler. He could see its rusted top, cold with disuse. Sam stood up. “Why didn’t we think of this?”

“It probably took him all night.”

“Maybe all of several nights. These boards are three inches thick.”

They split up and searched his haunts. He was nowhere to be found.

“I know where he lives,” said Sam. “Above the drugstore.”

He hadn’t been down that street in a while. Now it was coming back to life. Where before, there had been nothing for sale, there were now a few things—used clothing, cooking implements, and the like—in dilapidated, but opened, storefronts.

When he came to the drugstore, though, he was surprised.

It was neat, intact. The sign had been repainted. Its windows sparkled—no small accomplishment on these dust-ridden streets. The door stood open, and he went inside.

On the shelves were modest stocks of various items. A small stack of bandages; two tins of tooth powder; a bottle of alcohol. It was thriving compared to most of the shops.

Behind the counter stood a young, blond woman. She was strongly built, was neatly dressed, and had Perler’s eyes.

“Can I help you, sir?” she asked, in well-rehearsed English.