Astronomy(2)

Indeed, Foley’s rolling stance of authority had improved since she’d seen him last. She wondered if he’d been practicing in a mirror. That would be like him.

Foley squinted at her, up and down. His cigar rolled to one side. “How you doing these days, Ensign Gilbert?”

“Great,” she said. “I’m a civilian. Maybe you’ve heard.”

Of course, that wasn’t what he meant. Like everyone else she knew, he meant, How you doing since Berlin?

Her OSS friends had let Berlin drop long ago. But Walter Foley had been her case officer. He didn’t let anything drop. Her mental health had become his ongoing concern.

Susan had been surprised by all the attention when she got back from Berlin, not altogether unflattered. But something proprietary lurked at the bottom of all his sympathy and encouragement. Walter Foley worried for her state of mind the way Joe Lewis’s corner man worried for his cuts. She could see him now, gearing up that jovial Pat O’Brien routine—How’s my Hot Shot? How’s my girl? His girl. That grinding sound back of her jaw—that would be her teeth, yes?

She would have told him to back the hell off if Charley Shrieve hadn’t stepped between them.

“Night’s getting long,” Charley said. “Maybe we want to save the photo album stuff for another time?” He made one of those embarrassed nods like men do. Susan could almost hear him whispering: Christ, Walt. Give the kid a break.

And then, to her: “You ready to meet my guy Hartmann?” She could tell by Charley’s face that she wasn’t going to like this.

“Yeah, sure,” she said.

He led her back to a little room overlooking an empty warehouse. The room looked like some sort of shipping clerk’s office. She could see train schedules for 1940 on the wall.

The center of the room was filled with a dinner scene, served up for a man with torpid eyes, greasy blonde hair, and the thick skin of a hard drinker. An old desk had been righted and covered with fine linen. A table setting of paper-thin Dresden china was laid before him. Susan picked up an ornately scrolled sterling-silver fork. She had not seen such expensive tableware since her undergraduate days at Boston College.

Of course, the scene was rendered perfect by the dollop of quicksilver filling the tea cup, brimming at the edge of the dinner plate, forming a silver drool down the rigid man’s lips, a silver puddle around his buttocks.

She realized the man was full of mercury, to the point that his guts had burst under the weight of it.

She became aware of a certain silence. She looked up to see every man in the room watching her. She started to go, “What?” But she knew what was up. They were waiting for her to catch a case of the vapors.

Very deliberately, she picked up the elegant ivory dinner candle in front of the plate. “I like the candle,” she offered. “Lends a nice romantic air, don’t you think?” She looked around the room for validation.

The two soldiers scowled at each other. Perhaps they wondered how a pretty young lady of breeding and refinement could be so callous? Susan had been in this business awhile now; she was used to these little moments of masculine discomfort.

Bogen and Shrieve looked relieved. If this was a classic Watermark operation, they would be worried about anybody who couldn’t hold their water at a time like this.

“I suppose I should make a formal introduction,” Shrieve said. “Everybody, Herr Hartmann. Herr Hartmann,” he extended a hand to all, “everybody.”

“This is your informant?” she asked.

Shrieve looked away. His cheek muscle twitched in the candlelight. “Things never got that formal between us,” he said. “He told me he had a line on six tons of mercury.”

“Looks like he found it,” Susan said quietly.

“It was going to some place called ‘Site Y.’ He was supposed to slip my boy Bogen here on board his truck; maybe we’d get a look at this Site Y at long last.”

That still didn’t answer the question most central to her mind: “What’s my part in this?” she asked.

“We brought you here as sort of a technical advisor,” Shrieve said. “We wanted someone who could tell us whether this Conrad Hartmann was giving us the straight dope on a few things.”

“Use your experience,” he’d said. She should have known. Her experience the last six months had been with Operation Watermark, verifying the outlandish stories of Nazi war criminals trying to escape the Russian army.

“Sorry I couldn’t be of more help,” she said. She didn’t know but maybe she should be insulted. “I know you gentlemen have a lot to do here. If I can just get a ride back to my apartment, I’ll be out of your way.”