The Teleportation Accident (45 page)

The Chief Investigator: Couldn’t you have read it yourself?

Mr Loeser: I was enjoying my steak. But then she said something about Congress, something about un-American activities, and something about going to Washington to testify, so straight away I dropped my cutlery and snatched the document out of her hand.

The Chief Investigator: Why so alarmed?

Mr Loeser: For some weeks I’d been in correspondence with a librarian at the Library of Congress about their copy of
Midnight at the Nursing Academy
. I was posing as a researcher from Columbia University, but my real intention was to travel to Washington, break daringly into the Library after dark, and steal the book. When the subpoena arrived, my first assumption was that my plot had been discovered – by some means I couldn’t even imagine, since obviously I hadn’t said a word to anyone – and I was being called to trial. I didn’t know what to do. I just stared at the subpoena in silence. (I have never met anyone who is more comfortable than Mildred with long and unexplained silences.) At last my wife finished eating and lit a cigarette. ‘We have to go to Washington,’ I blurted with a pubescent glissando.

The Chief Investigator: What was her response?

Mr Loeser: She simultaneously rolled her eyes and blew cigarette smoke out of the side of her mouth as if her whole face was being hoisted to the right. This occurs only once every few weeks due to the respective periodicities of the two actions and I find it supremely beautiful.

The Chief Investigator: More beautiful than her smile?

Mr Loeser: Yes. Anyway, she very seldom smiles.

The Chief Investigator: More beautiful than her laugh?

Mr Loeser: Yes. Anyway, she very, very seldom laughs. Except when she’s reading
Krazy Kat
.

The Chief Investigator: What’s
Krazy Kat
?

The Chairman: I believe it’s a newspaper comic strip.

Mr Loeser: By George Herriman, yes. Last year, for Christmas, on the recommendation of the bookseller Wallace Blimk, I bought her a 192-page
Krazy Kat
anthology published in New York by Henry Holt and Company with an introduction by EE Cummings. I’ve never understood what’s funny about it, but quite often I come home to find her slumped in an armchair with the book in her lap, snotty and straggly and red-faced like someone who’s just been informed of the death of a close relative.

The Chief Investigator: Doesn’t that make you jealous of Herriman?

Mr Loeser: A bit, but he died in 1944. And has never, to my knowledge, given my wife an orgasm.

The Chief Investigator: To return to the matter at hand, for how long were you under your misapprehension about the nature of the subpoena?

Mr Loeser: All the way to Washington. As a matter of fact, I was still squashed under it like a cockroach yesterday afternoon, when I left the hotel to buy some stockings for my wife, who had forgotten to bring a spare pair. I was walking down Calvert Street when I caught sight of someone it took me a moment to recognise. I hadn’t seen him for nearly fifteen years. It was Hans Heijenhoort – Ziesel’s sidekick from Berlin. We shook hands and went into a coffee shop to sit down.

‘When did you leave Germany?’ I asked him when my hot chocolate had arrived.

‘At the end of the war,’ Heijenhoort said. He has strong, almost heroic features, but his face is both much too long and, at the base, much too wide, so it’s only when he bows his head and the trapezoid proportions are foreshortened by perspective that he’s contingently quite handsome, like something from a parable about humility.

‘And you live in Washington?’ I said.

‘No, I live in New Mexico. I’m here for some meetings. Are you still in touch with any of the old gang from university?’

We began to go through them one by one, as people do in these situations. ‘Did you hear what happened to Ziesel?’ I asked.

‘Yes. Terrible.’

‘I was right there in the room. What about Klugweil?’

‘Yes, I heard about that too,’ said Heijenhoort.

‘I didn’t! What happened to him?’

‘Oh, quite an exciting story. He got conscripted into the Wehrmacht and ended up working for an army propaganda unit stationed in Paris. No one seems to know all the details, but somehow he got involved in the Resistance over there – something to do with a girl. And he became a very enthusiastic traitor. He used to pass along information, for instance, about where the next security sweeps were supposed to take place. Well, one day he realised that his commanding officer had begun to suspect him, and he fled. The Resistance hid him in a farmhouse just outside Paris, and the following morning they were going to try to smuggle him out of France. But that same night the SS came to the farmhouse – perhaps the Resistance had a traitor of their own. They beat him up, tied him to a chair, and then set the farmhouse on fire with paraffin. They told him he was going to burn alive.’

‘And then?’ This was not a dignified moment, I decided, to bring up the time Klugweil unacceptably started sleeping with my ex-girlfriend.

‘After the farmhouse was reduced mostly to ashes, the SS men went back inside for a look around. They were expecting to find Klugweil’s blackened skeleton. But there was nothing there. He’d escaped out of a window. Several months later, he turned up in Switzerland.’

‘What happened?’

‘The SS know how to tie a man up, of course. Even if you could dislocate your own arms, you wouldn’t have been able to wriggle out of those ropes. But Klugweil managed it. I heard he was never willing to explain exactly how.’

‘What about Achleitner?’ I said.

‘He died in the Battle of Berlin.’

‘And Blumstein?’

‘Dora.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘A work camp.’

‘Oh.’ I was silent for a while. Then I said, ‘What were you up to during the war?’

‘Physics. Just the same as ever.’

‘Still at university?’

‘No.’

‘Where, then?’

Heijenhoort picked up his cup of coffee and then put it down again without taking a sip. ‘For a certain period I was attached to the Ordnance Department.’

‘No! You were working for the Wehrmacht?’

‘Just an accident of organisational structure. My work was almost all theoretical physics. I wasn’t building rockets underground with slave labour like von Braun.’

I leaned back in my seat, suffused with gloating warmth. ‘You know, Heijenhoort, I always thought it was unnatural how indiscriminately nice and helpful you always were to everyone, and now I know I was right! I bet you were just as indiscriminately nice and helpful to the Third Reich! Good nature is deviant, like I’ve always said. You should meet my wife, she could teach you a thing or two.’

Heijenhoort got up and started to put on his scarf. ‘I had no choice, Loeser. You wouldn’t understand. You weren’t there.’

‘Oh, Hans, come on, don’t go! I haven’t seen you in fifteen years!’ I knew he wouldn’t be so self-assured as to leave after I’d asked him to stay. And sure enough he sat down again. ‘How did you get out of Germany?’ I said.

‘In that last April of the war, we were evacuated from the laboratory. We ended up hiding in the mountains. We weren’t under guard any more, but we were terrified that the SS would shoot us all just so no one else could have us. The next worst thing would have been the Russians. They might have taken us straight back to Moscow for torture. The British or the French would have been all right. But it was the Americans. They made us some good scrambled eggs. After that they put us in a barracks for a few weeks, and then on a plane to Boston, and then a train to New Mexico.’

‘And now you’re working for the State Department?’

‘Yes.’

I wondered how different I, too, might have found America if my first years there had been arranged for me in detail by some government office – and then as a sort of toy theodicy I tried to imagine the baffling aims that such an office would have to have had in order to arrange my first years there as they actually were.  ‘Is Cordell Hull making you read a lot of H.P. Lovecraft?’ I said.

‘Who’s H.P. Lovecraft? Anyway, no, Hull’s not there any more. He resigned a few years ago. Sarcoidosis.’

‘So what are you doing for them?’

‘I’m sorry, Loeser, but I’m sure you understand that I can’t say anything about that.’

‘Presumably the same sort of thing as you were doing for the Ordnance Department,’ I said. ‘That’s why you’re valuable. But what did the Ordnance Department care about theoretical physics? Was it anything to do with the atomic bomb?’

‘No.’

‘What, then? Are you going to make me guess? That’s no use. I spent a few years at CalTech but I don’t know anything about the state of the art. Apart from ghosts and robots and that fellow trying to build a machine for making eel congee out of electric eels that was itself powered by electric eels, all I ever heard about back then was . . .’ I leaned forward. ‘Oh my God. Teleportation. You were working on teleportation, weren’t you? The Nazis were trying to develop teleportation as a weapon of war.’

This time Heijenhoort held my gaze. ‘Yes, Loeser. That’s right. And we didn’t do so badly. Why do you think the Soviets pretended Hitler’s remains were burned and buried?’

‘God in heaven, you’re telling me Hitler teleported himself out of the bunker?’ I shrieked. ‘So he’s still alive?’ There were puzzled looks from nearby booths.

‘Yes, Loeser. That is the world-shaking secret I am telling you, here in this coffee shop.’

‘Oh, are you being sarcastic?’

Heijenhoort got up again. ‘I’m sorry, Loeser, but I must be going.’

‘When did you become capable of sarcasm?’

‘Things happen in war.’

‘Hey, listen, they must have told you a lot of secrets in New Mexico?’ I said.

‘Not really. We’re still Germans.’

‘But do they know what happened to Bailey?’

Heijenhoort nodded as he put down a quarter-dollar for his coffee. ‘They spent almost a year studying his device after they removed it from CalTech.’