The Rocket Man (8 page)

She moved away and looked out of the window, at the view of stone roofs and the formal gardens laid out in squares with paths running between the box hedges. Everything was covered with a fine layer of frost and snow.

Dmitry came up to stand behind her. He said, ‘I don't want to see any more paintings. Let's go back to my apartment.'

She said, ‘I'll have to call Bob.'

She rang Bob from a call-box and said she had bumped into a friend and would be late. Was that all right? She was going somewhere for coffee with her; it was Marianne. Dmitry stood next to her and watched her tell this string of lies without any trace of expression on his face. Then they caught the tram and went back to his apartment. All the way there she was pierced with desire for him, almost in pain, not knowing how she could bear waiting, and yet almost enjoying the pain of anticipation. They almost ran up the road together and the moment the door closed behind them they were stripping off their clothes.

As she lay down on the rug on the floor to receive him, he hesitated; despite his urgency, he reached back to his discarded coat and withdrew a condom from the pocket. Then he rolled her over, put his arm round her waist and puller her towards him, entering her from behind. In this position he seemed to go in deep, so deep, the sensation was so exquisite that she begged him to go on, but he, too, must have been very aroused, and came quickly, crying out loudly, as if in pain. He curled over her, stroking her, covering her back with kisses. Then they went to the bedroom and made love again, this time more slowly and tenderly. She did things with him that she would never have considered doing with Bob; she confessed to him every secret desire. When they were finally lying quietly with their arms around each other, Katie asked, ‘Has it been like this for you with anyone else?' and he said, ‘No, of course not, how could it have been? You are not like anyone else.'

This tenderness disturbed her, because she so much wanted and needed it; Bob never said such things. But what she was doing was frightening; she wasn't sure she could cope with it. She turned away from him suddenly. ‘I shouldn't be here. I can't carry on like this, seeing you, deceiving Bob. I feel so ashamed.'

‘No,' said Dmitry, touching her face, ‘That is the lovely thing about you; you are shameless.'

‘But only with you,' said Katie, ‘I'm only like this with you.'

N
ihal knew within a few hours of beginning his researches that he was onto something potentially very big.

The index to
International Aerospace Abstracts
contained various references to Wolfgang L Richter dating back to the mid-1970s. There was a paper given at an Aeronautics conference in California in which Richter said he had developed ‘A bi-propellant rocket engine with low thrust and high performance… it has been made possible to achieve unlimited burning without ageing, short pulsing time, high reliability and low cost.' This paper gave the name of a company after Richter's name:
Raketenforschung GmbH
. Nihal had looked up some other papers; they were all in the same vein. The later papers referred to his company as RASAG,
Raketen und Aufklärungs-Satelliten AG
. It was all technical stuff, way over his head. He looked through one or two general scientific and aerospace magazines. In one he found a small piece about the German company seeking investors for developing a low-cost satellite launching system.

In the Space Directory Nihal had found a listing for the company, RASAG. It was based in Stuttgart and was a small enterprise, developing low-cost rocket technology. Richter was the president; the chairman was a man called Karl Weiland. That rang a bell; Weiland, he recalled, was one of the Nazi rocket scientists from Peenemünde who had at one time been a consultant to NASA.

This was interesting. He rang RASAG's offices in Stuttgart and spoke to the PR man, Becker, who promised him a brochure in the next post. Becker, who spoke excellent English, emphasised that the company was carrying out space research and that it was entirely independent of the German Government. They planned to offer rocket launches which would be far cheaper than the existing choices, making satellite technology available to a wider range of companies and nations than at present.

But when asked where they were going to launch the rockets, Becker suddenly refused to say, telling him that a deal with an unnamed country was under negotiation.

Richter's history was not hard to unravel. A brilliant young engineer, he had won his first research contract while still at university. He had then gone into industry and joined two of the wartime German scientists, Sänger and Pilz. At first, his company had received huge contracts from the West German Government, and was given the use of government research facilities. But in the mid-1970s the Government cut all ties with Richter, who appeared to have then hit a lean time, trying to raise money for his research.

In the mid-1980s he married Liliana Carneiro, then one of the top models for fashion magazines; her lean, honey-coloured face decorated their covers, while, on the inside pages, her slender bronze body was draped with the most expensive clothes. This marriage bought Richter into a new world of wealth, power and prestige. He began to be more successful in raising money, mainly from private investors, and before long had recruited Weiland, one of the last surviving Nazi rocket scientists, and formed RASAG.

Nihal then telephoned the Nazi-hunting agency, the Jewish Documentation Centre, conveniently situated here in Vienna, to find out about Weiland. Some years ago, Nihal had interviewed one of the few British scientists attached to the US Air Force team which had liberated the concentration camp at Nordhausen, where rocket parts were fabricated by Polish slave labour. This man had spoken movingly of the mounds of corpses, the starving and beaten prisoners, and the small children, conceived by raped camp workers, running round hungry and ill-clothed. Nihal believed that at least twenty thousand workers had died making the rockets. He recalled that this scientist had also been present at the interrogation of some of the scientists, including Wernher von Braun, he had a list somewhere of their names, and wondered if Weiland had been among them. At this time Nihal had also visited the massive bunker at Eperleques in the Pas de Calais, a huge German wartime factory for the assembly and launch of the V2 rocket. As he had trudged in the cold March rain round this grim, abandoned place, in which thousands of half-Jewish Germans, together with Polish, Belgian and Russian prisoners of war, had slaved and perished, his spirit had quailed. He had indeed felt it to be, as the monument at the entrance proclaimed, ‘One of the sacred places of human suffering.'

Weiland would now be in his eighties. Like von Braun, he had been a card carrying member of the Nazi party. For years, again like von Braun, he had worked with NASA and achieved acclaim. His presidency gave a certain prestige to RASAG, even if he played no active part, but it also linked it to this unsavoury past. But Nihal was puzzled. Under the UN Space Treaty, no private organisation could put a rocket into space. There was also the Missile Technology Control regime, by which Germany was bound. In fact, the whole thing was distinctly odd. The very idea of a private company selling cheap rocket technology to whoever wanted it was horrifying. If no-one knew about it yet, he thought, they certainly ought to.

Katie lay in bed with Bob. She tossed and turned, and couldn't sleep. Her conscience tormented her, she had lied and wanted to confess to him, but she couldn't. Anyway, what would be the point? It would simply hurt him, and there was no reason why he should know anything. She had resolved to end her relationship with Dmitry at once.

But how could she give this up? Why was sex so good with him, so much better than it had ever been with Bob? She didn't understand it. She rolled over again, pulling the covers off Bob, and he grabbed them, impatiently.

‘What the hell is the matter with you? Can't you let me sleep?'

She said, ‘No. I want sex.'

She had never said anything like this to him so simply and directly. He half sat up on one elbow, astonished.

‘Are you feeling okay?'

‘Don't you want to?'

‘Well, of course, I always want to.' He put his hand on her thigh, stroking her. She rolled onto her back, put his hands where she wanted them. He, obviously excited by this initiative, was already erect, getting ready to penetrate her. She pushed him back.

‘No, not yet… carry on like that.'

‘Like this?'

‘No, not exactly… here.'

It was impossible. He didn't seem to understand what she wanted and it humiliated her to have to ask. She realised that she often pretended more pleasure than she felt in order not to hurt his feelings and that in the long run this hadn't been good for them. Yet it hadn't always been like this; she had sometimes wondered whether Bob was simply bored with her. She imagined, for a moment, being with Dmitry. Even thinking about him excited her.

Bob was inside her now, and she slipped her own hand down between them and made herself come. Once was not enough for her now; she went on, and he went on, and then in the end she came once again, with him; he lay still, on top of her, his arm vaguely stroking her arm, obviously puzzled.

After a while he rolled off her. He lay on his back, his eyes open.

Katie, feeling desperate, sat up, took his face in both her hands and forced him to look at her. ‘Bob, I'm so bored. I want to leave Vienna. Can't you get another job?'

‘Why this, suddenly?'

‘Well, Lieselotte's going, there's nothing for me here and… oh I don't know.'

‘As it happens I was thinking about trying something else. Give me time, I'll see what I can do.' He was silent for a few moments. ‘Is that the only reason?'

Katie lay back in the semi-darkness. ‘What other reason could there be?' The question hung between them, the silence filled with tension. Katie felt her heart beating, afraid that he suspected something. She realised that she had never been truly intimate with Bob, had never really shared her inmost thoughts; she had always been aware of having to play a certain part, had never been able to let go and be herself, in case Bob disapproved of her. Now she was afraid to confront him, afraid of his reaction. This realisation was a shock; she had known Bob for years, had lived with him, had a child with him. How could she feel more intimate with a man she hardly knew, whose language and culture were entirely different?

She turned back to Bob, half intending to say something, but to her relief she found he was already asleep.

When Bob came home from work the next day he told Katie that it seemed Hans Müller had had a mistress. An anonymous woman with a Viennese accent had rung up the IAEA claiming that Müller had got her pregnant and demanding some form of compensation if they didn't want her to publicise the fact. Apparently she had asked to speak to the DG, and when told this had not been possible she rang, separately, half a dozen people in the organisation, including the Director of Information and several people in Safeguards. She had sounded angry and distressed and had said vicious things about Müller. Everyone who had spoken to her had been shocked by her abusiveness; it had left a nasty taste in the mouth.

Katie too was dreadfully shocked. She turned the oven down so as not to ruin the supper and followed Bob into the living room. ‘Oh God,' she said, ‘I hope Lieselotte doesn't hear about it. Do you think it's true?' Bob shrugged. ‘Well, you never know what any of these people are up to on the side, do you?' Katie turned away from him, unable to meet his gaze. The phone rang. It was Lieselotte, in great distress. She had just been phoned by the woman claiming to be Hans's mistress. She had put Jochum to bed and finished packing her things; she was due to leave for Cologne in a couple of days. The woman, whoever she was, had said obscene things to her about what she and Müller had done together. Lieselotte could not bear to repeat them. She had wanted to hang up but had not felt able to; she had listened almost against her will because she had been so tormented by her imaginings that she thought anything would be bearable if only it were the truth.