“Do you believe in miracles?” Susan, who’d been silent for a while, suddenly said.
Leets considered. Then he said, “No.”
“I don’t either,” she said. “Because a miracle has to be sheer luck. But I believe certain things are meant to happen. Meant, planned, predestined.”
“Our meeting again in the hospital?” he said, only half a joke.
“No, this is serious,” she said.
He looked at her. How she’d changed!
“You’re generating enough heat to light this quarter of the city. I hope there’re no Kraut planes up there.”
“Do you want to hear about this, or not?”
“Of course I do,” he said.
“Oh, Jim, I’m sorry,” she said. “I know you’re feeling awful. Outhwaithe was very cruel.”
“Outhwaithe I can handle. I just know something and I can’t get anyone to believe me. But don’t let my troubles wreck your party. Really, Susan. I’m very happy for you. Please, tell me all about it.”
“We have one. Finally. One got out. A miracle.”
“Have one what? What are you—”
“A witness.”
“I don’t—”
“From the camps. An incredible story. But finally, now, in March of 1945, a man has reached the West who was in a place called Auschwitz. In Poland. A murder camp.”
“Susan, you hear all kinds of—”
“No. He was there. He identified pictures. He described the locations, the plants, the processes. It all jibes with reports we’ve been getting. It’s all true. And now we can prove it. He’s all they have. The Jews of the East. He’s their testament, their witness. Their voice, finally. It’s very moving. I find it—”
“Now just a minute. You say this camp was in Poland? Now, how the hell did this guy make it across Poland and Germany to us? Really, that’s a little hard to believe. It all sounds to me like some kind of story.”
“The Germans moved him to some special camp in a forest in Germany. It’s a funny story. It makes no sense at all. They moved him there with a bunch of other people, and fed them — fattened them up, almost like pigs. Then one night they took him to a field and …”
“It was some kind of execution?”
“A test. He said it was a test.”
And Susan told Leets the story of Shmuel.
And after a while Leets began to listen with great intensity.
7
Vampir would work; of that Vollmerhausen had little doubt. He had been there, after all, at the beginning, at the University of Berlin lab in 1933 when Herr Doktor Edgar Kutzcher, working under the considerable latitude of a large Heereswaffenamt contract, had made the breakthrough discovery that lead sulfide was photoconductive and had a useful response to about three microns, putting him years ahead of the Americans and the British, who were still tinkering with thallous sulfide. The equation, chalked across a university blackboard, which expressed the breakthrough Herr Doktor had achieved, realized its final practical form in the instrument on which Vollmerhausen now labored in the research shed at Anlage Elf, under increasing pressure and difficulty.
It was a business of sorting out dozens of details, of burrowing through the thickets of technical confusions that each tiny decision led them to. But this is what Vollmerhausen, a failed physicist, liked about engineering: making things work. Function was all. Vampir would work.
But would Vampir work at forty kilos?
That was another question altogether, and although his position officially demanded optimism, privately his doubts were deep and painful.
Under forty kilos?
Insane. Not without radically compromising on performance. But of course one didn’t argue with the SS. One smiled and did one’s best and hoped for luck.
But forty kilos? Why? Did they plan on dropping it from a plane? It would shatter anyway, and shock absorption hadn’t been tied into the specifications. He’d gone to Repp privately:
“Surely, Herr Obersturmbannführer, if you could just give me some reason for this arbitrary weight limit.”
Repp, frosty, had replied, “Sorry, Herr Ingenieur-Doktor. Tactical requirements, that’s all. Someone’s going to have to carry the damned thing.”
“But certainly there are vehicles that—”
“Herr Ingenieur-Doktor: forty kilos.”
Lately Hans the Kike had been having nightmares. His food bubbled and heaved in his stomach. He worked obsessively, driving his staff like a tyrant, demanding the impossible.
“Hans the Kike,” he heard one of them joke, “rather more like Attila the Hun.”
But he had come so far since 1933, and the journey was so complex, so full of wrong starts, missed signs, betrayals, disappointments, unfair accusations, plots against him, credit due him going to others. More than ever now, 1933 came to haunt him. The last year I was ever truly happy, he told himself, before all this.
A year of beginnings — for Vampir, for Kutzcher, for Germany. But also one of endings. It had been Vollmerhausen’s last year with physics, and he’d loved physics, had a great brain for physics. But by the next year, ’34, physics was officially regarded as a Jewish science, a demi-religion like Freudianism, full of kabala and ritual and pentagram, and bright young Aryans like Vollmerhausen were pressured into other areas. Many left Germany, and not just Jews either; they were the lucky ones. For the ones who stayed, like Vollmerhausen, only melancholy choices remained. Dietzl went into aerodynamics, Stossel back to chemistry; Lange gave up science altogether and became a party intellectual. Vollmerhausen too felt himself pressed into an extraordinary career shift, a daring, uncharacteristically bold one — and one he hated. He returned to the Technological Institute and became a ballistics engineer, rather than an exalted Doktor of Science. It hadn’t the challenge of physics, the sense of unlocking the universe, but everybody knew there’d be a war sooner or later, and wars meant guns and guns meant jobs. He threw himself into it with a terror, succeeding on sheer determination where once there’d been talent. It began to look as though he’d made the right decision when he was invited to join Berthold Giepel’s ERMA design team. ERMA, the acronym for Erfurter Maschinenfabrik B. Giepel GmbH, Erfurt, was at that moment in history the most fertile spot in the world in arms design, and from all over the world acolytes swarmed, young engineers out of the technical institutes, or off apprenticeships at the Waffenfabrik Mauser at Oberndorf, or for Walther AG in Munich, even a Swiss lad from SIG and an American from Winchester. All were turned down. For the brilliant team that Giepel had assembled was up to nothing less than revolutionizing automatic weapons theory by building a Maschinenpistole off the radical open-bolt straight-blowback principle, which made for greater manufacturing simplicity, lightness and reliability, yet at the same time permitted air circulation through breech and barrel between rounds with subsequent temperature reduction, jacking the rate of fire up to about 540 per minute cyclical. They were inventing, in short, the best submachine gun in the world, the MP-40, until it became better known under a different name.
These should have been extraordinary days for Vollmerhausen, and in a way they were. But his physics background, like a whiff of the Yid, clung to him. He could never shake it; the others gossiped behind his back, played small pranks, teased him unmercifully. They hated him because he’d once aspired to be a scientist; what scientists he now came in contact with hated him because he was an engineer. He grew into a somewhat twisted personality, with a tendency toward surliness, bitterness, self-pity. He was grumpy, gloomy, a great self-justifier and blamer of others. His head was full of imaginary compliments that he felt he deserved but that he never received, because of course the others were jealous of his brilliance. Out of all this was born the name Hans the Kike.