Astronomy(25)

Betty stood back, aghast, and Susan walked off. “Come back,” Betty called. “Help me stop this Philistine from ruining the meal!” Susan lowered her head and kept going.

She passed Bogen standing at the kitchen door, going, “What’s wrong with garlic for breakfast . . . ?” She slugged the back of his head. That, she figured, was doing her bit for sisterhood.

Charley Shrieve was on the phone when she walked into his office. The room looked like him—neat, quiet, a little more reserved than was maybe healthy.

He caught the weight of her gaze, cut the conversation short, and hung up the phone.

“You didn’t have to do that,” she said.

“Ike will call back if it’s important.”

“Ike—that’s a joke, right?”

She noticed a smile on his face, but it disappeared even as she watched. He cleared a spot for her on the edge of his desk. Susan had sorted Conrad Hartmann’s disorderly mess into a neat chronological story of the rise and fall of the Faulkenberg Reservoir weapons lab.

She set it aside. She’d get to that in a while. Out of all this stuff, she’d found just one photograph that mattered enough to show her case officer.

Three men stood in the foreground—a pair of German officers and a disheveled scholar she recognized as Carl Leder. They had a giant volume opened up in front of them, something that looked as if it had been bound in some exotic leather (which, you might say, it was).

The book was the source of the exposure. Indeed, the book itself was all but obliterated by lens flare—though no uplighting appeared under the chins of the three principals. Whatever light had burned the photograph must have been invisible to the men in the picture.

They were consulting like contractors working off of a blueprint; only there was no blueprint. They were checking the layout of their weapons laboratory against a diagram in the Necronomicon.

She directed Shrieve’s attention to the German officer on the right.

“See the tall, aristocratic one, nice smile, looks like he’d have the latest story about the Farmer’s Daughter? I, uhm, I know him.”

Shrieve had this expression of professional interest. He resettled his glasses on his nose; suddenly his eyes were as blank as a Nebraska sky reflected in chrome. It had been funny when Shrieve had looked this way at Carl Leder.

Wasn’t so funny now.

“This is ‘Galileo’? This is the guy who did the magic trick and disappeared?”

She dug in her shirt pocket for another Marlboro. The pack was empty. Shit.

“This is the guy I went in to find,” she said. “A Krzysztof Malmagden. He turned out to be a major in the SS. He was assigned to head security for Zentralbund der Geheimlehre’s Totenstürm program.”

Shrieve watched her pat her pockets a moment. “You looking for a cigarette?” Charley Shrieve had a cigarette. He even lit it for her. “You didn’t tell me your boy Galileo was Major Krzysztof Malmagden.”

Susan frowned at the familiar way Shrieve spoke of him. “You know Krzysztof Malmagden?”

“Let’s say I’ve heard the name. He’s a scary guy, even for a Nazi. How come you never mentioned him?”

“He must have slipped my mind.”

“You want to talk about him now?”

She laughed. She couldn’t believe she was letting herself in for this. She was a civilian. She was supposed to be in Stony Brook, New York. She was supposed to be introducing freshman lit majors to John O’Hara.

“I was sent into Berlin to check out the head of the German’s Totenstürm program, for a possible extraction. Only it turned out to be some sort of, I don’t know, practical joke? This Major Malmagden had never communicated anything to the Allies. The Gestapo was there and they wanted to know who I was. They wanted very much to know what I was doing there.”

“Did this Major Malmagden . . .” Shrieve resettled his glasses on his nose. “Did he abuse you?”

Susan loved the way guys asked her that—sort of compassionate and avid at the same time. Even the smart ones, like this Charley Shrieve. She’d let herself get angry the first couple weeks back from Berlin. Eventually she realized anger just fed their lurid imaginations. “Oh. She doesn’t want to talk about it . . .” Jesus.

“Not exactly,” she said. “Things got way out of hand. Things took an odd turn.”

* * *

Shrieve was silent for a long time after she finished her story. He seemed uncertain what she wanted him to do. “It was a goof,” he said. “He saw a handy American and realized you might be useful at his war crimes tribunal.”

“I feel terrible,” she said.