This Shared Dream (56 page)

He side-leaped the fence, which was not very high, just meant to keep children from running into the street, and landed with a
clump!
as his scratched combat boots hit the sidewalk, and felt silly because he now had a hell of a pain in his left knee.

He wondered if he should just grab Whens, risking arrest, or follow him. He reached for the Q, so he could ask Wink, then searched every pocket. Gone. Crap.

The boy’s blond hair shone beneath a street lamp then darkened as he moved past the light. The boy moved in a determined and fierce short-legged jog. Sam drew closer, deciding: He would simply pick up his grandson and let him scream for help. He didn’t want to frighten him with pursuit, though—he could easily get away from an old man. Sam was thirty feet away when a car pulled up next to the boy, then moved in tandem with him.

“Whens!” Sam broke into a run, feeling like a very old man, wheezing and puffing with the sudden effort.

A short, fat man in a suit, wearing a ridiculous homburg, jumped from the car and seized the boy. The hat fell to the sidewalk.

Whens indeed screamed and hollered. And kicked.

Sam punched the fat man in the face. He staggered backward. Whens bit the man’s hand, which covered his mouth, and the man let go.

Whens darted down an alleyway, his pack bobbing behind him.

Both men took off after him.

Wilhelm

WILHELM’S EVENING

July 22

I
N WILHELM’S SANCTUM
, a slight breeze rattled his plastic window blinds as he patiently tried to put together the material he had. He’d thought the books he’d taken from the Dance library would help.

But apparently, he still did not have enough information.

He shoved the books away from him, and took a few swallows of fake German beer. He’d been very disappointed to read, on the label, that Löwenbraü was manufactured in the United States.

Everyone, everything, had failed him.

The only helpful thing had been a very strange note, just a jot on the endpaper of
What Is Life?
The book itself was piffle, of course. Schrödinger was not a Jew, but he’d left Germany because he did not like Hitler’s anti-Semitism campaign, so he was obviously not very intelligent.

The jot said, “Game Board?”

His spies—helpmeets and friends he’d cultivated over the years—had been keeping a close watch on the Dance family, and on their house. They understood the import, the majesty, of his quest, and that they would share in the outcome. They also agreed to wear old-fashioned homburgs, but he wasn’t sure now that that had been a good idea. The brims could disguise them, somewhat, if they were pulled down low, but the hats made them stand out. The real reason was that he was sentimental about homburgs; his father had worn them; many men at that time wore them, in Germany. Everyone would wear them again, once the right people were in charge.

Setting the house on fire—that was another mistake. He’d let his anger get the better of him, but he thought the house would go up like tinder. It might have killed Jill. But Jill had gone to the market with that colored man, according to his compatriot, Adler, his Eagle—short though he was, he was far-seeing—and it was then he began to suspect that her respect for coloreds, and all her work for Africa, which he had assumed that someone as brilliant as Jill could not be sincere about, might be sickeningly real. Maybe he was mistaken about her. But no—later, at the house, she had actually allowed the colored man, Kandell, to touch her … his stomach roiled.

Yes, he had been stupid. He might have killed her. Maybe that was what he had wanted, at that moment. But he had endangered the big plan. That was what happened when you let emotion overtake you. Without Jill, he might never know the secrets he must learn. And he might have left clues at the house.

At any rate, Eagle had seen, on the seat of Brian Dance’s truck, a metal board, covered with … games. Just games. A small checkerboard. A racetrack. Things of that nature. The Game Board of the scrawled note? He had wasted time calling to ask Wilhelm if that might be something he wanted.

Wanted?
Yes!

But it was too late. Brian had surprised Eagle when he was trying to break into the car, and to escape pursuit, he drove to the German embassy, where he worked as a janitor. He kept an eye on things there too. It was terrible, the things he saw and heard; Germans had forgotten their great mission altogether. They had lost their soul. Wilhelm knew, though, that he only needed to find out how to empower the Device, or build one himself.

The plans. That was all. He’d broken into the truck himself, later that night; no need to leave it to amateurs, and the board was no longer there.

It didn’t matter. The plans were what mattered. And now, he could think of only one way to get them. It was desperate, yes, but once he had the Device, or the plans, he would have the power—the power that Jill didn’t even seem to know she had.

He Q’d Eagle: “Time for Bip.” Bip was a useful thug—white, of course—with connections to other thugs. “Yes, that’s right. I’ve made the decision. I know it might take some time. Be alert, though. You never know when an opportunity might arise.”

He looked back at his security screen. Now what?

He had hacked into the condo’s security system when he moved in, ten years ago, and enjoyed keeping an eye on things. He always knew what his neighbors were up to. Right now several police cars were pulling up in front of the building.

He picked up his poor, twisted Device, then, in a split-second realized that if indeed they were after him, and he had it on him, or if they found it here …

Opening the hooks on the window screen, he pushed it out the window, and rehooked the screen. He was only on the fifth floor; there was nothing but a small, unused grassy verge behind the condo.

He locked his office, ran out his front door and down the hallway, toward the emergency exit stairway. Once through the door, he left himself a slice of vision. The police got out of the elevator and knocked on his door.

Gently pulling the door closed, he descended the stairway. They wouldn’t realize he had known they were coming until they got into his locked room, so if he was lucky he could get out of the side exit before they surrounded the building.

When he reached the ground floor, he listened. No shouts, no unusual sounds. He opened the door, looked out, saw no one, and walked away, swiftly blending into pedestrian traffic. As usual, there were plenty of strollers and window-shoppers in Georgetown this evening.

He would come back later, after they had left, to retrieve his artifact. No one, walking by casually, would find it remarkable enough to even pick it up. It looked rather like a rock.

His phone rang. It was Eagle. “What? Excellent news. I will give you a new address. Bip must take him there immediately. There is a key over the doorjamb. No, I won’t be there until tomorrow afternoon. I must prepare … things.”

He increased his pace. Luck was on his side at last.

Lev

KOSLOV’S TALE

July 22

J
ILL WAS AT THE BOOKSTORE
. Whens had just called from his father’s, sounding forlorn. She gathered some books to take to him when she visited him at school tomorrow during his lunchtime. She agreed with Elmore that he should not be at Halcyon House right now. As she resumed her place at the counter and began looking through the books, Koslov walked in.

She tried not to freeze, and wondered if she should call 911.

The store was full of customers. She tried the
Golden Arrow of Breath,
but still her heartbeat quickened.

He walked quickly to the counter. “Jill, there is something I must tell you.”

She looked him in the eye. “What?”

He looked around. “Not here.”

“Here. Now.” Koslov stepped back while Jill sold a stack of books, and then returned to the counter. His deep-set eyes were worried.
Even concerned?
she wondered.

He pulled his wallet from his back pocket, opened it, pulled a photograph from behind his driver’s license, and laid it on the counter in front of her.

It was a black-and-white photo of three people standing on the wide front steps of a stone house; behind them, the doorway looked regal, and on both sides of the door were potted palms and wicker chairs. On the left was a middle-aged woman, possibly from the 1930s, judging from her clothing. Next to her was a young woman, whom Jill recognized, instantly, as Hadntz. And the third person—

Koslov put a nicotine-stained finger on the young man. “Me. I was twenty. I was a friend of Rosa Koslov. I also knew her daughter, Eliani, a very talented woman. She had an M.D. like her mother, and a doctorate in physics, like her father. I have been trying to—”

Another customer approached. Koslov whipped his photo from the counter; Jill chatted with the customer and sold a paperback mystery. The customer left.

Koslov said, “I know what happened to you, Jill. The same thing happened to me. I’ve been tracking down a … valuable artifact, for years. I know it is in Washington. I met your mother, long, long ago. I am trying to help you. You are in danger. Please meet me in”—he looked out the window—“that restaurant, there, across the street, when you close. You don’t have to be afraid. There are plenty of people there.”

Jill watched him jaywalk across the street and enter the C&O Restaurant. The door closed behind him.

Jill called Daniel. There was no answer. She left a message: “Koslov asked me to meet him in the C&O Restaurant when I close. I think I should. Maybe you could sit at the bar and keep an eye on things? Call me.”

Only ten minutes until closing time. There was only one customer in the store, browsing. Jill turned off the lights in the back. The customer looked up. “I thought you were open till nine.”

“We are. Just getting ready to close. Do you want anything?”

She shelved the book she’d been reading. “No, not tonight.” She left.

Jill locked the door behind her, put the cash in the safe instead of in a deposit bag, which she usually did, grabbed her purse, and locked the door behind her.

Daniel wasn’t there. Koslov was in a booth in the back, nursing a drink. Jill ordered chowder and wine on her way over, then slid in opposite him. Koslov lit a cigarette.

“I don’t have all night,” she said.

“You’re a bit like your mother, you know. Businesslike.”

Jill absorbed this information with a mental
check
! Aloud, she said, “How did you meet the Hadntz family?”

“Eliani’s father is Russian, as is a great-aunt on her mother’s side, which is how they met, when they were young. I’d always known their family. I visited whenever I was passing through Vienna. By the time this picture was taken, Eliani had developed many interesting theories about the brain, physics, consciousness, and her thoughts about ending war, which she shared freely with me.”

Jill dug into her clam chowder and sipped her wine. She was hungry. “I’m listening.”

“Eliani went to colloquiums with the luminaries of the day. Bohr, Dirac, Pauli, Meitner. Meitner got her a job with Rutherford, in England, and she worked briefly with Fermi in Chicago but was disgusted. She wanted nothing to do with the atomic bomb. Instead, she went her own way, invented her own use for the powers of quantum physics.”

“Her Device.”

Koslov nodded, apparently unsurprised. “During the war, a version of the device fell into Russian hands, through a man named Perler, who sold it to them.”

Perler again. “What did you do during the war?”

“I was lucky. I had a heart condition that exempted me from military service. It was fixed by surgery about twenty years ago, but”—he glanced ruefully at his cigarette and shrugged—“I was teaching at what was then Leningrad University, as a graduate student; history was always my passion. The university was evacuated during the siege, but I stayed there; I had formed a close attachment to Rosa’s mother-in-law, who was elderly. I helped her, and many others, survive. There’s a story in that, but no time for it now. We managed to get out during one of the evacuations, and spent the rest of the war in Saratov, at the evacuated university. I actually taught; made a little money. During that time I had ties to an anti-Stalin organization. Late in 1944, a packet with Rosa’s poems came to us, and several more arrived thereafter. I think that Eliani’s father died during the war, either in Germany or Hungary. Eliani’s grandmother died too, before him, perhaps; she was quite elderly, weakened from the siege, and I believed that grief from the war was the final cause of her death.

“By the end of the war, everyone knew what Stalin was doing; he was a murderer on a much grander scale than Hitler. My underground ties strengthened, and I lived, quite dangerously, in St. Petersburg, which was renamed Leningrad, and a time of purges began. Kosmopolitanism, of which I had always tried to be guilty, was a crime, for which you could be arrested.” He laughed.

“After the war, your mother sought me out. She was trying to track the Perler Device, and also those plans. I was astounded at the breadth of what my childhood acquaintance, Eliani, an older woman whom I admired from afar, had accomplished. Bette recruited me for the OSS, and I agreed readily. I was always sure death was around the next corner, anyway. She worked out my emigration, and procured a teaching post for me. When your parents moved to Washington, I was a frequent guest at their house, and I remember you when you were young, Jill. Ah, I’ve finally elicited surprise!” He smiled. “One day, you and your brother and sister recruited me to play a game on what you called the ‘Infinite Game Board.’ I told your mother, afterward, the strange effect it had on me, and I believe she took it away.”

“I found it again.”

“So I gather. The Perler Device was tracked, solely by your mother, who took pains that the CIA not know the extent of her involvement, to another expatriated Russian, whose name was Mikhel, but by the time she found him, he had passed it to someone else, and he died without revealing who that person was. And so it was left hanging.”