God's Formula (4 page)

“Welcome to Section D, old man,” said Eldridge White.

“Are we at war?” Ian Fleming asked.

Section D, Fleming knew, had been organized by White’s predecessor, Hugh Sinclair, to engage in political and para-military operations on enemy soil in the war with Germany that Sinclair, and everyone else in SIS, knew was coming. Hence Fleming’s question.

“We’re about to be.”

“Is this about our man in Berlin?”

“No, his son. He’s arriving at Gare de l’Est at eleven p.m.”

Fleming looked around the room. The bartender was polishing glassware, humming quietly. A man in a navy blue suit was talking to a fashionably dressed woman at the bar. Two businessmen-types were having a drink at a banquette in the far right corner. Otherwise the dark, very quiet, exquisitely appointed lounge was empty. Fleming knew that the Caxton Bar was an MI-6 meeting place, that the hotel in which it was located, St. Ermin’s, was rumored to have secret underground tunnels connecting it to the nearby MI-6 headquarters on Broadway. This was, however, his first official invitation here. He had questions of course, but to press the chief of the service, well, that just was not done. Not if he wanted to be invited back.

“His son,” he said, finally. “I see.”

“Age fourteen. Hitler Youth type. He has the formula.”

Again Fleming said nothing.

“Where is Friedeman,
pere
? you’re thinking,” said White.

“Yes.”

“Do you know the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute? It’s in Berlin.”

“No.”

“It’s where Friedeman works, where this bomb research is being done.”

Silence.

“We’re told it blew up this morning. Quite an explosion.”

Both men were drinking St. George whiskey neat. They looked at their glasses, then sipped.

“Who am I?” Fleming asked.

“You’re still Anthony Harrington, the wine buyer.”

“And the Duke and Duchess?”

“You won’t be gone long. They’ll be in good hands until you get back.”

“What shall I do with him?”

“He’ll be with another lad. There will be a plane at Orly. The same one that will bring you over. The bartender will fill you in. He’s an old Etonian we call Bix. You and the professor stay with the boys. Bring them both to 54 Broadway. Tolkien can start debriefing on the way.”

“Tolkien?”

“Your old friend.”

“Delighted.”

“The thing is,” White said, “the formula’s supposed to be in some secret mumbo jumbo only Tolkien can decipher.”

“Remarkable. What would we do without Tolkien?”

“Quite. It appears Friedeman père wrote the thing with Tolkien in mind. This was conveyed to Einstein, who conveyed it to the Americans, who conveyed it to us.”

“The Americans…”

“They’re not interested. They think it’s nonsense.”

“So the formula will be ours?”

“Yes. It’s worth the candle.”

Fleming smiled and tossed back the remains of his whiskey. He wanted another, but waited for White, who, a second later, did the same and then motioned to the waiter for another round.
Thank you, C
, Fleming said to himself. “Is Tolkien meeting us here?” he asked.

“No, he’s being briefed and will go over separately. Perhaps you’ll have another story to tell. Amulets, Satan. Explosions in the forest.”

“Not likely,” replied Fleming. “There and back again in a jiffy.”

The drinks came, and both men sipped. Fleming could tell by the set of Ellie White’s mouth, the slight relaxation of his square shoulders, that their business was over, that this second drink was for simple enjoyment. Fleming relaxed as well. This was the second time he had met White. They had met earlier in the year in Prague. Fleming had made the mistake of calling him
C
then. He wasn’t chief yet, just acting for Hugh Sinclair, who was ill and had since died. White had indeed succeeded Sinclair, but now Fleming knew enough not to call him anything. SIS, the Secret Intelligence Service, of which the Directorate of Military Intelligence, Section Six—MI-6—was a part, did not officially exist. He and old Ellie were an insurance agent and a prospective client having a drink.

“What about our bridge game tonight?” Fleming asked.

“Ah, yes,” said White. “Our cheater.”

“Strange man.”

“You think he’s looking?”

“Yes, the silver cigarette case.”

“Delicate matter.”

“He’ll get the message.”

“Too bad we need his damned nickel alloy plants so badly.”

“He won’t cheat again, I promise, and there will be no spectacle.”

“We’ll do it tomorrow night. I daresay you’ll be home before breakfast.”

“Fine with me.”

“Any questions?”

“No.”

“Good, drink up. You’re expected at Northolt in an hour.”

Karl Brauer did not have relatives in Strasbourg. He was a boy with a butcher’s skill set and a secret. His deftness with various knives had taken him five years at his father’s side to learn; the secret, also learned from his father, five minutes in a conversation yesterday: he was a Jew.

Karl looked over at Conrad Friedeman and confirmed that he was still asleep, then out the window to the French countryside bathed in moonlight so bright the bales of hay scattered in the pastures cast velvety shadows in the form of perfect parallelograms. He looked at his watch, a gift from his father. St. Dizier was just ahead, then another sixty miles of hay bales and the occasional farmhouse and barn and they would be in Paris.

“I can’t keep it secret much longer,” Karl Sr. had told him as they sat in their small apartment above Karl Sr.’s shop. “Your mother, may she rest in peace, was Jewish, full-blooded. My mother as well. My father was what they now call Aryan. You have three Jewish grandparents. Under German law, you are a Jew. My father’s name, and the help of my lawyer, are what has kept you from being arrested and sent to a camp. Himmler’s race police are bearing down more and more all the time. I have repeatedly lied about you, to school boards, government authorities. If I am caught…If you are caught…”

“Is Conrad also a Jew?”

“No.”

“Then why…”

“He is Hitlerjugend, with papers. His father is highly respected. They will not question you traveling with him.”

“But…”

“You must do as I say. He will sleep for six or seven hours straight. When you meet the man with the white carnation, you will place yourself and Conrad in his custody. He will take you both to England.”

“I don’t understand. Why the sleeping medicine?”

“Conrad thinks he is a Nazi. He must be tricked.”

“He will hate me.”

“He is one person. If you stay here and are discovered, eighty million people will hate you. No doubt you will be sent to a camp. I have told you the things I have heard about these camps.”

“Who is the man with the carnation?”

“I don’t know. A friend of Professor Friedeman, someone who has offered to help.”

Karl glanced at Conrad. Still asleep. The vial of sleeping medicine he had mixed with Conrad’s Coca-Cola when they were an hour or so from Strasbourg had taken effect immediately. He would likely have to wake him when they got to Paris.
Papa
, he said to himself, recalling his effort to hold back his tears last night as he asked his father the question he did not want answered.

What will
you
do, Papa?

“
I will join you as soon as I can. Professor Friedeman will know where you are settled. I could not pass up this opportunity to get you out.”

Karl doubted that he would ever see his father again. He knew this, in fact, as children know such things. Alone with the sleeping Conrad in the darkened first class cabin, Karl cried. He put his thumb and index finger to his eyes and, a frightened child on a strange journey, cried without restraint.

“
Albert Einstein
. I must say.”

“Yes.”

“Extraordinary.”

“I agree. Quite.”

The two men, J.R.R. Tolkien and Ian Lancaster Fleming, sat on a pew-like, high-backed bench facing the Arrivals platform at Paris’ Gare de l’Est. Overhead they could hear pigeons cooing in the steel rafters that held up the cavernous building’s immense glass roof. Occasionally, one or two flew down and pecked at the pink and gray striated marble floor at their feet. Ignored by the two men, they flew off to their sleeping quarters on high.

“The young chap who flew me over had very little to say,” said Tolkien, who punctuated this remark with a long pull on his pipe.

“You’ve been briefed,” replied Fleming. “Pilots fly.”

“I sat right next to him.”

“Sound training.”

“I’m amazed, I must say.
Einstein
. The atomic bomb.”

“We’re strange creatures, we humans,” Fleming answered. “Can’t seem to go in one direction, can we?”

Tolkien smiled and shook his head. Five hours ago he had been awaiting supper with Edith and his children on Northmoor Road. Now he was in a Paris train station, waiting for a fourteen-year-old boy—a devout Nazi, no less—to arrive with a coded formula that only he, John Ronald Tolkien, an obscure professor of English literature, of all the people on the planet, could decipher. He had been trained as a code breaker in the spring at the Government Code and Decipher School in London, but never expected an assignment so quickly; nor one in which MI-6 had had it from the Americans, who had it from Albert Einstein, of all people, that the formula in the boy’s possession would lead to the building of an atomic bomb in just a month or two. What were the odds, Arlie Cavanagh, a gambling man, had said as they were leaving Northmoor Road. Indeed, what were the odds?

“How have you been keeping?” the Oxford Don asked, breaking away from his reflections on the scene at home, his hasty goodbyes to Edith and the children. “You look in fighting form. ”

“I’m a wine merchant.”

“A wine merchant? You were such a good journalist.”

“Better cover.”

“I see. Doing what?”

“Keeping an eye on David and the American girl.”

“Ah, yes, all those Nazi salutes. Depressing. What have they been up to?”

“They go between the Bois and Cap d’Antibes,” Fleming replied. “They’re in London at the moment. David’s being read the riot act, which will have no effect on him whatsoever.”

“Is he really that naïve?”

“Naïve? Talk to Churchill.”

“I doubt he’d take my call. Is there something afoot? Regarding our former king?”

“We hear the Germans would like to see him in Berlin, more or less permanently, use him as a propaganda tool.”

Tolkien had been following the doings of the Duke and Duchess of Windsor since the Duke, then King Edward VIII, abdicated the English throne in 1936. The following year, during a visit with Hitler at his mountain retreat in Bavaria, David, as the Duke was known in the royal family and among the monarchy-mad public, had gone around giving full Nazi salutes, pictures of which appeared for days in the British press. No one, not even obscure, pipe smoking Oxford dons, could miss seeing them. Had the fair haired David learned his lesson by now? Surely he wouldn’t aid the Nazis voluntarily. Rumors of their atrocities were spreading everywhere.

“You don’t mean
kidnap
him?” Tolkien said.

“There’s hard evidence.”

“My goodness, one thing does lead to another.”

“Yes,” Fleming said, “my kingdom for…”

“For what?” Tolkien asked.

Fleming had stopped in mid-sentence and was grinning mischievously. He lit a cigarette from the one still burning and took a long drag on the new one. “Let’s be kind and say for love,” he replied after exhaling smoke up toward the glass ceiling.

The professor remained silent. He knew what that mischievous grin signified. He had heard the rumors.

“You’re not impressed,” said Fleming. “I’m surprised, I must say.”

More silence as Tolkien smoked his pipe.

“I thought it would be just the thing,” said Fleming.

“You mean for a professorial type like me?” Tolkien replied. “Awash in sentimentality.”

“Well…What
would
impress you?”

“What if the duke was immortal?”

“Immortal?”

“Yes, it means to live forever, never dying.”

“I know what it means.”

“I daresay you do, what with Eton and Sandhurst.”

“What are you saying?”

“Well, if our David was immortal and had to give
that
up for his fair lady, his fair
mortal
lady, then I would be impressed.”

It was Fleming’s turn to be silent. “I apologize,” he said, finally.

“It’s just a thought,” Tolkien replied, embarrassed by the apology, a bit ashamed by his sarcasm. More than a bit.
Thank God for the confessional
.

“A writer’s thought?”

Token nodded.

“And you?” Fleming said.

“Me?”

“Yes, how have
you
been keeping.”

It struck Tolkien now that, though they had been thrown together in a micro war the year before, and had shared intimacies in only the way soldiers in battle could, he and Fleming knew very little of or about each other. They were, after all was said and done, still strangers, separated by the highest and strongest walls in England, the walls of class.

“Lecturing, three meals a day, smoking my pipe, stout at the Bird,” the professor replied.
And
the writing?
Why leave that out, John?

“The family?”

“All well.”

The Billie Shroeder affair was short-lived
. That’s what Arlie Cavanagh had told him during his post-Berlin debriefing last fall.
It didn
’
t end well for old Ian
. Steer clear, John Ronald.

“Is there a new novel?” Fleming asked.

“I’m flattered, but not yet I’m afraid.”

“Some day you’ll have to tell me how you do it.”

“I say, are you thinking of writing something?”

“The thought’s crossed my mind.”

“What I write is quite outré.”

“That’s the ticket, then.”

“Ian?”

“Yes.”

“This formula. Can it really be…?”

“Changing the subject, are we?”

“No.”

Silence.

“I suppose I am,” John Ronald said. “I apologize.”

“Don’t think I could pull it off?”

“You’re a man of action.”

“I’ll slow down one day. Live vicariously.”

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

Silence, and a smile from Fleming.

“Shakespeare,” said Tolkien. “That’s the one and only piece of writing advice I’ll ever give you.”

“
Merci
.”

“
Rien
. And the formula?”

“It’s true,” Fleming replied. “Enrich uranium in a couple of months. Atomic bombs at the ready.”

“In the hands of a fourteen-year-old Nazi.”

“Strange but true.”

In the near distance, Tolkien heard the rumble of an incoming train and then two short blasts from its air whistle.

“Speaking of,” said Tolkien.

“Stay,” said Fleming, on his feet now and adjusting the white carnation on the lapel of his navy blazer. “I’ll get him.”