The Einstein Prophecy (16 page)

The Lions’ quarterback called tails, Einstein tossed the coin, then glanced down at the result on the back of his hand. “It is . . . tails, ja?” and before he could even think to repeat it, the referee declared, “Tails it is.” Turning to the Columbia player, he said, “Do you elect to kick, or receive?”

“Receive.”

Einstein was escorted back to his seat, and the Tigers kicked off. Lucas explained what was happening as the game went on—“each team has four downs to advance the ball ten yards,” and “there’s a penalty for what’s called holding,” or “you can’t cross the line of scrimmage until the ball is hiked”—while Simone and her father did their best to follow along. Lucas had the impression that Dr. Rashid, despite his reluctance to come, was beginning to become engaged by the rules and strategies of the game, which was exactly what had appealed to Lucas back when he was in high school and had quarterbacked his team to a state championship. He had enjoyed trying to outthink his opponents, and figure out his players’ deployment: Where did you send your receivers, how did you make the most use of your blockers? In those days, Lucas had seldom been sacked. Today, with a patch over one eye, he’d be a sitting duck.

At halftime, with Columbia ahead by one touchdown, the Princeton band marched onto the field in orange blazers and straw hats, playing the usual Sousa medley, and Lucas treated Simone and her dad to hot dogs with generous helpings of relish and mustard—“you’ve got to have the full football experience,” he joked—before discovering that her dad was vegetarian.

“Oh, my apologies,” he said, going back for a hot salted pretzel, which Dr. Rashid accepted with gratitude. There was a nip in the air, and the warmth of the food was a welcome antidote. Lucas thought that even Simone had managed to lose herself in the game, and forget, for this short while, the momentous discoveries and events of the past few days. When a Princeton player caught a kickoff and then miraculously ran the ball all the way back downfield and across the goal line, she jumped to her feet with the rest of the crowd, clapping her hands together in glee.

“Now they get three more points if they can kick it between the goal posts?” she asked, and Lucas found himself utterly charmed by her growing enthusiasm.

“One,” he said, and after the football had soared cleanly between the uprights, the Lions called for a time-out to regroup.

As the crowd stamped their feet and stretched their arms to get the blood flowing, Lucas noticed a man in a long houndstooth coat, with the collar turned up and a battered hat pulled low, moving down the aisle to his left. Why the man caught his eye at all wasn’t clear at first; it might have been the fact that his face seemed so purposefully concealed, or the deliberation with which he was traveling toward the reserved seats, but Lucas’s time on the front had taught him not to ignore his instincts.

The game was already nearly over, the sun settling lower in the sky and a chill descending; the ushers were no longer paying much attention to the activity in the aisles, or to people switching from the bleachers to better seats closer to the field.

The houndstooth man slipped around them all like a shadow, fixed on something straight ahead. Judging from the path he had so far taken, Lucas figured that his goal—or target?—might be the four luminaries, whose heads were bent low in conversation, oblivious to everything going on around them.

“Excuse me,” Lucas said, abruptly getting to his feet and inching past Dr. Rashid and Simone.

“If you’re going back to the concession stand,” Simone said, “the treats are on me this time.”

Lucas didn’t answer; his entire focus was on the man, whose hands, he now saw, were wedged deep into the pockets of the overcoat. Lucas stepped as nimbly as he could over the other people in the row—one of whom protested, nonetheless, that he had kicked over a thermos—but he was still a dozen yards away when he felt sure that the man was gripping something tightly, and then saw one hand emerge holding a long, sharp blade.

“Watch out!” Lucas shouted as he scrambled over the spectators still in his way.

The man had already reached the front row, and just as Russell rose to adjust the blanket he’d been sitting on, he leapt forward, with the knife raised. Einstein, oblivious to the threat, was tamping tobacco into his pipe.

But the leap had been clumsy, and whether he’d slipped on the concrete or tripped over someone’s shoe, he wound up falling between two rows, the knife scraping against the edge of the wooden seats, right between a startled Russell and Einstein’s back. Someone screamed, and the man was up and on his feet again, the hat shoved low on his brow, the knife flashing in the late afternoon sun. As Russell stumbled backward, out of reach, and Einstein turned his head—though he still didn’t seem to understand what all the commotion was about—Lucas launched himself over a woman still sitting, and rammed his shoulder, like a fullback, into the side of the assailant. They both toppled over, crashing into a couple of other terrified spectators, then tumbling down between two rows of seats.

Lucas groped for the hand still clutching the knife, as the man struggled to get up again and complete his mission. It was almost as if he wasn’t aware of Lucas’s intervention—his mutilated, but suddenly familiar, face was as blank as a slate, and his coat fell open to reveal a ruddy neck, bumpy as a gourd.

Lucas grabbed at the cuff of his overcoat, but the man swung the knife wildly, slicing through the sleeve of his leather bomber jacket. Slamming the hand holding the knife against the edge of the seats—once, twice, three times—Lucas tried to shake the blade loose. But the man would not let go. His eyes, dull and glassy, looked empty of intention, though his swollen lips opened wide to shout out something that sounded like gibberish. Lucas shoved his open palm under the man’s chin, snapping his jaws shut and smacking the back of his head against the concrete.

The hat rolled away under the seats. The knife clattered to the cement. The head came up again, shouting the same thing once more, and Lucas slammed it down even harder. This time he felt a sudden ebbing of strength beneath him, as if the air were suddenly escaping from a punctured balloon. The body went slack beneath him, the mouth dropping open like a trapdoor, emitting an odor so foul Lucas could barely breathe. The man’s eyes, perhaps catching some errant ray of the autumnal sun, flashed with a golden gleam.

Lucas felt a hand gripping his shoulder, and registered Taylor saying, “You can let go now. You can let go.”

The gleam in the man’s eye winked out.

Lucas was dimly aware of ushers shepherding Einstein and the others in his party up the aisle. Gödel, hardly able to walk from the fear, was being supported on either side by Russell and Szilárd.

“It’s okay to let go,” Taylor said, trying to calm him.

Lucas leaned back on his haunches, trying to catch his breath again, his heart still pounding. Taylor had his hand under his arm now, and was helping to raise him up and then deposit him on one of the vacated seats.

Lucas was still trying to make some sense out of what he was seeing.

Lying at his feet, his coat torn open in the struggle, wearing a soiled hospital gown tucked into a pair of suit trousers, was the janitor from the art museum. Wally Gregg.

Simone was suddenly beside him, her hand on the lapel of his jacket. “Are you all right?” she said, her father leaning anxiously on his cane behind her. She plucked at his punctured sleeve and said, “You’ve been cut.”

But Lucas still didn’t feel it; the adrenaline coursing through his veins was keeping any pain at bay. All he could focus on was the body sprawled in the aisle. The body of a man who had already been through hell, a man everyone had expected to die in the hospital bed where Lucas had left him.

Only he hadn’t. He had died here, and at Lucas’s hand.

Ushers, and then a pair of cops, cleared the other onlookers away. The announcer declared over the PA system that, although there was no reason for panic, everyone should leave the stadium immediately, in an orderly fashion.

“We have to get you to a hospital,” Simone said.

Taylor agreed—“and get him a tetanus shot, he got cut with that knife”—as several more cops showed up to cordon off the area. Lucas felt Simone’s arm wrap around him as he moved up the aisle toward the exit.

“He said something,” Lucas said. The crowd, agitated, jostled them on all sides. He was starting to feel some sensation in his upper arm, and something warm—blood—trickling down below his torn sleeve.

“I didn’t hear it,” Simone said.

“I wonder what it was.”

“I heard it,” Dr. Rashid confessed as they passed into the gloomy shadow of the archway.

“You did?” Lucas said, lifting his injured arm to his chest in an attempt to shield it from the throng surging around them. “What was it?”

“It was Arabic.”

That sounded about right, though he still had no idea what the words meant, or how Wally Gregg of all people would have come to shout them.

“Ancient Arabic, in fact.”

The pain in his arm came alive, as abruptly as if a switch had just been thrown. Wincing, Lucas said, “Meaning?”

With an ashen expression on his face, Dr. Rashid carefully planted his cane on the next step, then answered, “It was an oath. A common one in that region of the world.”

The PA system blared some unintelligible instruction.

“It means, ‘Death to the swine.’ ”

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Professor Einstein and his friends were whisked out of the stadium by policemen, loaded into a cruiser, and driven straight back to Mercer Street, sirens blaring and lights flashing. Helen was already waiting on the front porch by the time they got there, and quickly brought them all inside, closing and locking both the screen door, which was usually left open, and the inner door, too. A cop, arms folded, was stationed on the front steps.

Russell, Szilárd, and Gödel were all as agitated as could be expected, though Einstein himself felt an odd sense of calm. The incident, after all, was over, with no serious repercussions—unless that young man, the one with the black patch, had been seriously hurt. He would have to make inquiries about his welfare.

While Helen fussed over the others, offering tea and brandy and wrapping a blanket around the shivering Gödel’s shoulders, Einstein himself went up to his office to gather his thoughts. He shrugged off his coat and was just about to toss it on the sofa when he noticed what looked like blood spattered on the collar. He knew it wasn’t his own, and now he was even more concerned about the fate of that young man with the eye patch. Something told him that he had even seen the fellow before, and then he remembered—he had observed him once or twice on the porch of that house across the street. Ah then, that would make it easier to find out if he was all right.

Brushing some papers from the seat of his desk chair—Helen sometimes piled his mail there so he wouldn’t miss it—he plopped down and let out a great sigh. In a way, he was surprised that this sort of thing hadn’t happened to him more often. Every day, he received a flood of fan mail from people in all walks of life—budding scientists, schoolchildren, even the occasional female admirer—but mixed in with all the pleasant stuff were angry letters from cranks, maniacs, conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites, and proud and patriotic Americans who believed he was a Communist sympathizer or worse. J. Edgar Hoover, Einstein knew perfectly well, suspected him of harboring pro-Soviet sentiments and, as a result, had undoubtedly been keeping a file on him at the FBI for many years. It was Hoover, without question, who had been instrumental in revoking the top security clearance that Einstein had once enjoyed.

And which Oppenheimer had secretly circumvented by coming to his house for help.

When the phone rang only minutes later, he wasn’t surprised. He waited for Helen to answer it downstairs, as she always did, then listened for her knock on his door. When it came, he said, “Yes?”

“It is from New Mexico, Professor.”

He didn’t have to know any more than that. He swiveled his creaking chair toward the desk, cleared away some paper debris, and picked up the receiver. He had barely said hello before Oppenheimer blurted out, “Are you all right?”

“Yes, Robert, I am fine.”

“I’m told the assassin is dead.”

He was? Einstein had not known that for sure. “But he cannot have been an assassin, can he, if I am still here and on the telephone?” At the worst and most trying moments, it was his habit always to try to find a joke. “That is only logical,
ja
?”

“You’re spending too much time with Gödel.”

Einstein managed a dry chuckle. “Leó and Bertrand are keeping him company right now, in the parlor.”

“Is that Bertrand as in Russell?”

“Yes.” Einstein could virtually hear Oppenheimer taking in this one small detail he might not have known.

“Huh. I was told there was someone else in your party. They didn’t tell me it was Mr. Pacifism and Appeasement himself.”

“He has come around in his opinions, you know. In light of what is happening in the world today, his views, like mine, have had to change.”

“Well, that’s a relief.”

“Have you considered that the attacker might have been after him, and not me? The knife fell right between us.” Even with the static on the long-distance line, Einstein could hear Oppenheimer snort.

“Nobody wants to kill a philosopher, Albert. Nobody cares.”

“And they care about physicists? To most people, I am just an old man long ago put away in mothballs.”

“Not to that guy with the knife you weren’t. Whoever he turns out to be, he knew better than that. That’s what worries me. Will you listen to me now, when I say that you need a bodyguard? I still have friends in Army Intelligence who will okay it if I say so. Hoover will never even know.”

“I will think about it.”

“Don’t bother. You’ve got more important things to think about, like those problems we reviewed the last time I was there with you.”

“That is what I have been doing.”

“And? Have you figured out what we’re doing wrong?”

“The mathematics were precise, even elegant, but I do think that I have found the underlying flaw.”

“In the math?” Oppenheimer asked, surprised.

“No, you cannot beat John von Neumann at that game. The flaw is in the application. The mechanics.”

“Don’t tell me anything more over this phone. Write it all down, and I’ll send a courier. When do you want him?”

“Allow me the night to compose my conclusions. Send him tomorrow morning, late.”

“Okay then. Say good-bye to your cronies, Albert. I’ve already sent cars to round them up—I’ll make sure Russell gets wherever he wants to go, too.”

“But he is my houseguest.”

“Not anymore, he isn’t. What if your crazy theory is right and somebody wants to kill the apostle of peace and harmony, after all? There’s a war on—get back to work.”

Oppenheimer hung up, as usual, without saying good-bye, and Einstein sat back in his chair. Through the window, he could see a tabby cat lurking near the garage, stalking something in the backyard. He’d seen this cat out there before, and though he knew that cats, too, had to eat, he hoped that its quarry would escape unharmed. If only there were a way, he thought, that every living creature could survive without doing injury to any other. The world had been constructed along bloody lines, of that there was no doubt, and it remained a puzzle at least as baffling as the unified field theory he had been seeking so long.

Outside, he could hear the slamming of car doors, followed by the tromping of feet on the wooden steps of the front porch. Then voices, several of them—young, male, and peremptory. The security detail sent by Oppenheimer to safely escort everyone away. The man was a strict taskmaster, but then he had to be. A war, indeed, was on—the worst that the world had ever known. Einstein turned his attention to the blackboard on which he had been scrawling his latest calculations, and wondered again if he was serving mankind as an angel, or a devil. Would his work here bring an end to the war, or simply sow the whirlwind? It was something he could have discussed with Russell, a man as tormented by such questions as he was, for hours on end.

But not, it would seem, tonight. Tonight there would be no vigorous debate, no company at all, in fact.

Turning his attention to the blackboard, in only a few moments he had done what he had always been able to do, whether it was in a quiet study in Bern or on a crowded trolley car in Berlin—he had lost himself in his true home: the beautiful, and infinitely consoling, realm of thought alone.