The Empire of Night: A Christopher Marlowe Cobb Thriller (30 page)

But Stockman said this as uprightly and flatly as he’d spoken of the suicide of Haber’s wife. I kept my manner and face as neutral as his. I hoped he’d show more of himself now. A man who, in his ignorance, showed his prejudice, about whatever sort of subject, was a man who gave power to others. He showed the way his mind tended to stop working, his sensibility tended to shut out the real world. That was always useful, to a reporter or to a spy.

And Stockman said, “He converted to Christianity more than twenty years ago. So he is a Christian the way I am an Englishman.”

He let me fill in the meaning of that. Clear enough. He was still a Jew.

Stockman said, “He has been a German from birth. As was his father and his father’s father. Do they not bleed? I am one of those who thinks that Shylock was justified in seeking his revenge. And that Shakespeare intended so. But the Jew has his own blood. His people were born to wander. As things are, the Jew who has a legacy like Doctor Haber is certainly a German. He overtly proclaims his strong allegiance to Germany. You and I will take pride for America to learn what this German has done for humanity. Doctor Haber is my stepbrother, Josef. Certainly that. But does one trust a stepbrother as he does his brother by blood?”

Stockman shrugged, as if in answer to his own question.

I did not reply.

Stockman looked away briefly, at the passing shops along the Kaiser-Allée, and then back to me.

“I don’t know what you should make of that,” he said. “Perhaps just to understand the man.”

Once again, he looked beyond the taxi that carried us.

He said, still looking away, “I suppose I trust a loyal German Jew more than any London Christian.”

This ended the conversation between us for the last few miles to Dahlem.

Haber’s Institute for Physical Chemistry was a large but only lightly ornamented four-storey, nine-bay Greek Revival building, its central three-bay section sporting mid-floor Doric columns holding up a bare-bones pediment, which was adorned with nothing but a central, circular window. The one striking feature, however, was hardly classical: a circular tower attached at the building’s northern end with a
feldgrau
metal dome and a high-spiked spire making the thing look unmistakably like a massive, field-officer
Pickelhaube
.

The place was surrounded by barbed wire. It had two soldiers, draped with Mauser G98s, flanking the central door beneath the Doric columns. These boys were not features of the institute when it was pursuing the hundred-year quest to pull nitrogen out of the air so the plants could grow.

A soldier led us up the two central flights of marble stairs to Haber’s office. At each floor I glanced right and left and there was a quiet, ardent urgency about the place: white coats flashing, intense words from the end of a hall, a canister rolling on a hand truck with a gray-hair in a three-piece suit hovering over each turn of the wheels.

You walk into an institute of chemistry, especially a bustling one, and you expect the place to bray in your nose from the smells of things whose names are unpronounceable and whose purpose can be understood only in formulas. But the place smelled like a Boston Brahmin boarding school, all floor wax and ozone.

I did not have a chance to walk down one of these laboratory corridors. Immediately at the top of the third-floor staircase we turned into a short hallway back toward the front of the building and were ushered straight into a conference room with windows looking into the tops of the plane trees on the Thiel-Allée
.
I figured Stockman would get a grander tour when the interview was over and I was beyond the barbed wire.

The room had an oak table for ten and was hung with Holophane reflectors and tungsten lamps, illuminated now, in the afternoon light, for the sake of the wall facing the windows, which held a twelve-foot blackboard festooned with equations. If the corridors of the institute smelled like those in a boarding school, this was the faculty lounge, redolent of chalk dust and tobacco smoke.

Stockman and I sat down next to each other along the lengthwise center of the table, facing the blackboard. The soldier vanished.

We both stared at the equations for a moment, the flow of constants and unknowns, coefficients and parameters. As if on cue we looked at each other.

I said, “We needn’t worry so much about his saying something he shouldn’t. I just hope he says something we can understand.”

Stockman glanced once more at the equations, but only briefly. “I know some basics, from metallurgy,” he said. “But far downstream from this. Far enough so I could make useful things in the world.”

Like milk cans and Zepp bombs
, I thought.

We nodded knowingly at each other.

Then we had one of those silently agreed upon shifts in a conversation where the two parties understand there is nothing more to say about the current subject but aren’t ready to stop talking. We had to wait here together, so we consciously turned our minds elsewhere.

In so doing, Stockman’s eyes fell to my lapel. “I meant to say earlier. I admire your pin. I’m sure there’s a story behind it, which I’d like to hear sometime.”

Stockman didn’t know about the Nail Man, or at least about the reward for a big donation, and the Iron Cross was a powerful icon for this country. Good.

“The story’s a simple one,” I said, making it sound like humility masking bravado.

And Fritz Haber strode into the room.

He was a stocky man, wearing a bespoke summer wool suit, a high wing-tip collar, and a necktie knotted tight. He had a round face, with a pince-nez clamped to his nose, and was determinedly bald, having shaved off every last hair, slick as a chemical canister. The scar on his left cheek was of the South Chicago saloon-brawl variety, too short and too severely curled at the end ever to be rendered by a saber stroke.

Stockman and I jumped to our feet.

“Please, gentlemen, please,” he said. “We shall be informal with each other, yes?” Nevertheless, he placed himself across the table from us to reach and shake our hands. “Can I have my assistant get you some coffee?”

Stockman and I declined with thanks and we all sat.

Haber had known from the jump-off to speak German with this Brit and this American.

“It is a pleasure to see you again, Baron,” Haber said to Sir Albert.

“For me it is an honor, Privy Councilor Haber,” Albert said, using the honorific
Geheimrat
, an open acknowledgment that Haber had the ear of the Kaiser or at least of his high minions.

Haber turned his face to me.

I thought, for just a molecule of a moment, that the mysteries of chemistry were no greater than the mystery of the pince nez hoopspring, which held the damn fool thing in place.

“And Mr. Jäger, I am pleased to meet you,” Haber said. “Baron Stockman has told me very good things about you. That you should find it as preposterous as I do that your country has ignored what we have accomplished here, this is encouraging for me.”

“I have a forum to dispel that ignorance, Privy Councilor Haber,” I said.

He smiled. “I appreciate both of you recognizing my status, but please call me
Doctor
Haber.”

He said this with a magnanimous flare of the hands, as if he’d just sanctioned
Fritzy.

I took out my notebook and my Conklin, and
Geheimrat Doktor
Fritz began, no initial question necessary. He talked for a while—lectured, more like—about the challenge of the locked nitrogen molecules in the air: the delicate balancing of very high temperatures and very high pressure for extraction; the need for an effective catalyst for the project; the frustrating search for precisely the right one, with Haber eventually moving from osmium, which was good, to uranium, which was more abundantly available, and then, when BASF made an industry out of it, finally arriving at iron, though iron alone was a failure and needed a subtle blend of the oxides of aluminum and potassium and calcium to make it work. He called what he’d done a kind of alchemy, as if he’d figured out how to make gold from the air. These limitless nitrates meant, after all, that
Geheimrat Doktor
Fritz had saved the world from starvation.

I took dutiful notes.

And all the while, my mind sought the delicate balance of heat and pressure so as to extract, from the rush of highly charged molecules of air in this room, a fertilizing clue or two about Stockman’s full intentions.

Haber wrapped up his lecture and folded his arms, in satisfaction, upon his chest. “Those are the basics,” he said. “Perhaps you have some questions, knowing better than I what it is that Americans have failed to grasp.”

“Thank you, Doctor Haber,” I said. “What you’ve said is very clear to me and very compelling. Please understand that Americans in general have not even had the chance to grasp any of this. The failure has been among a very small group of Americans. The journalists.”

Haber nodded his head at the validity of my point. To his credit.

“And journalists,” I said, “need a catalyst. They are—on their own—simple iron. May I seek now, for a few minutes, the aluminum, the potassium, the calcium oxides to mix with them?”

Haber smiled and nodded as I appropriated the terms of his mini-lecture for my request, as if he were a teacher and gave a damn about his teaching and a student from the back of the lecture hall had raised his hand and made a smart comment.

I had a fleeting sense of him. Not so much what he was as what he wasn’t. Or didn’t seem to be. In mourning. He was nothing like a man whose wife blew her brains out with his own pistol a couple of months ago. He seemed animated without mitigation. He gave off energy and focus and devotion.

Either this was one hard son of a bitch or his anguish was so strong he’d dug a hole for it and threw it in and all this energy was him shoveling dirt. I hoped for the latter. That would make him even more eager to talk about what was presently preoccupying him.

It was time now to suppress my scoop-seeking reporter’s gag reflex. Which I did. And instead I recited my already twice-refined Stockman Doctrine, my fawning assurance to this guy that he could say anything that was on his mind and if it was the last thing in the world he’d want to tell a newspaper reporter, it was okay because I was there to protect him against himself.

In the midst of this, Haber had glanced once at Stockman, with a little flex around the eyes that appealed for reassurance. I’d kept my own eyes on Haber, and it was clear from the abrupt relaxation in his face that Stockman had come through for me.

When I finished, Haber said, “You may seek.”

“Thank you,” I said. “First, I’d like to return to a phrase you used—and naturally so—a few moments ago. ‘Your country,’ you said to me, referring to the United States of America. You are, strictly speaking, correct. But now I ask that you grant me the same assurance I have given you. I will tell you a thing meant only for the three of us.
My
country is Germany. It was the country of my father, and of my father’s father.”

I paused.

I did not need to say
Just like your father and your father’s father.
I could read his face. The ever so slight firming of his mouth. The minute nod.

“That is perhaps the aluminum oxide,” I said. “The American reporters who came to hear about your discovery lacked the . . .” I hesitated very briefly to find just the right word.

Haber intervened. “Promoter,” he said.

I cocked my head at him, and he elaborated.

“These compounds are called
promoters
of the catalysis.”

“Thank you,” I said. “Yes. These journalists lacked the promoter of an existing connection to our country. I come to this story able to energize it for my readers by my pride in Germany.”

Now it was time for a little catalytic self-deprecation, with an embedded appeal for him to spill his own beans. “I confess I’m intimidated interviewing such a great thinker as you, Doctor Haber. But at this moment in history, great thinkers need to step forward. I hope I’m saying all of this precisely. Am I making sense?”

“Perfect sense,” he said. “During peace time a scientist belongs to the world. But during war time he belongs to his country.”

I took a sudden, deep, seemingly admiring breath. “May I write that down?”

“Of course.”

I did.

“Your discovery will help feed our country,” I said. “Particularly in the face of this barbaric blockade of food by the British.”

“It will help,” he said.

“‘Barbaric,’ of course, is our private word.”

“An appropriate word for our private use,” Haber said.

“Are you continuing to refine the Haber Process for agricultural uses?”

“It is no longer a matter of science,” Haber said. “It is a practical matter, for industry. They are the ones who seek refinements, mostly to do with increasing output. You should speak to the people at BASF in Oppau.”