The Rocket Man (35 page)

The general smiled and turned to congratulate Richter; but Richter was clearly unhappy. He was explaining that one of the valves must have failed to open properly; the rocket should have gone straight upwards. Katie could sense his disappointment. But it must have gone a great distance; they could not feel the shock of its return to earth. Only later, in the distance, they saw a thin plume of smoke rising from the forests.

They drank the champagne that had been cooled for them; the general joining in, smiling politely. It was impossible to know what he was really thinking. Richter was already talking about the next launch. He was going to bring it forward. Everything else had gone perfectly; the next time they were using a cluster of sixteen pipes. The next day they would go out and retrieve the parts of the rocket, to try to see what had gone wrong with the operation on the valves. But they were all subdued; it was as if Richter sensed he was on dodgy ground, that he needed the President's enthusiasm above all else to ensure the continuation of the project, and that when he received the report of this partial failure it would perhaps sow the final seed of doubt in Rodriguez' mind. The general, smiling, shook Richter's hand and took leave of them.

They watched his plane take off and sat down on the terrace. Katie went back into the ranch and looked at the half-drunk glasses of champagne standing abandoned on the table.

Richter sat and banged his fist on the table, knocking over a glass so that the golden liquid spilt onto the floor. Liliana, alarmed, reached out and put her hand on his shoulder. ‘Don't worry,' she said, ‘It will not fail. You will not fail. Look at me!'

Katie was shocked because, although Liliana's voice was soft, her lovely face was both hard and cold.

For the first time, Katie felt some sympathy for Richter. She could see that he was genuinely depressed. He had worked desperately hard on the project and he was devastated by such a tiny thing as a sticking valve letting him down. Richter said that he would have to go back to Stuttgart to sort out a few things there and would be away a few days. Bob could stay here and supervise the recovery of the rocket wreckage. He also asked Bob about the possibility of getting UN observers to attend the next launch. He said that it was important that they did something to counteract all the propaganda against them; perhaps they should invite some journalists along, show it wasn't something sinister and secret. He had suggested this before but the military didn't like the idea; journalists were cover for spies as far as they were concerned.

Richter collected together the print-outs from the computer, sat down with one of the other scientists and started to go through them. With his customary arrogance stripped away, he seemed almost vulnerable, human.

Bob came and sat beside Katie. He said, ‘Are you okay? Do you mind staying here a few days? It's quite comfortable, isn't it?'

‘No, I don't mind.'

Katie wandered off to bed, restless and unhappy. In the morning when the house was empty she phoned the IAEA in Vienna to ask if they had the name of the hotel Dmitry Gavrilov was booked into in Buenos Aires, but they said they could not reveal to her where he was staying for security reasons. If it was urgent she could leave a message and they would try to get it to him. Katie asked for the number of the conference centre in case she could get a message to him there. As she spoke, Bob's shadow fell across the doorway. She looked up and him and smiled brightly. Suddenly it all seemed hopeless; she would have to wait. She went outside with Bob and watched Richter's Lear jet flying off into the sun.

D
mitry woke up in the middle of the night in his hotel room in Buenos Aires. After a while in which he waited intently for any foreign sound, he reached out for his watch. He felt an irrational sensation of fear as he put his hand out from the safety of the bedclothes.

It was three-twenty a.m. He sighed and let the watch fall back onto the table by the bed, closed his eyes, and tried to sleep again. This happened often, not every night, but often enough to be disturbing. Sometimes he woke from a nightmare; sometimes with an acute memory of the salty taste of blood in his mouth, the struggle to draw breath.

After a meeting yesterday when he had lost his train of thought and come to himself with a jerk, his head in his hand, uttering an audible curse, one of his colleagues had asked him, gently, concerned, if he was in pain. He had told him truthfully that he was not; his physical recovery had been remarkable. But he found it difficult to concentrate. He seemed to have lost his short-term memory. He couldn't hold a phone number in his head long enough to dial it without looking at it again. Someone would hand him something and he would immediately forget that he had been given it. He drifted around the conference centre, in and out of the main session, half-listening through the head-phones to the endless lifeless drone of the simultaneous translation. Sometimes he would tune in to Chinese or Arabic to listen to the unintelligible sounds. He wondered once or twice if he should see a doctor. The truth was that he was still afraid. He was not afraid of anything tangible; he knew that he was out of danger and that the nightmare was over. He was afraid of himself. A deep depression, which had hit him on discharge from the hospital in Vienna, kept taking hold of him. There were moments, increasingly frequently it seemed, when he simply felt he did not want to live.

When Dmitry had received Katie's letter before leaving Vienna it had thrown him into confusion. He had read it over several times on the tram on the way in to work and looked at the postmark; it had only been posted five days earlier. His first thought was to wonder what she was doing in Paraguay; then it seemed only too clear. Haynes, after all, had been deeply involved with Richter, and Dmitry's suspicions had been, he assumed, well-founded. He had puzzled over what Katie was trying to say. At first he had taken ‘I don't know what to do about it,' ‘If it is ever born' and ‘might' to mean that she was considering an abortion, something all too common in Russia; but then he had remembered that she had had a miscarriage and might be afraid of counting on this pregnancy continuing. What had struck him about the letter was her restraint, her uncertainty; it had given him an overwhelming feeling of sadness.

When he had arrived in his office he had told Hilde not to interrupt him for ten minutes, shut his door, taken a sheet of headed paper and started to write in his large, rounded handwriting. He wrote the letter straight off, without any corrections, went down to the fax machine, and sent it straight to the hotel in Paraguay.

He had heard nothing. Later, before leaving Vienna, he had phoned the hotel. They told him that no-one of that name was resident there or was booked in in the near future, but that they could take a message in case they arrived.

He rolled over in bed. He thought about Katie and was instantly filled with despair. What if she had gone to the States or back to England to have an abortion. Could she know what Bob was doing, what the implications were? He had no idea. He tried to put it from his mind, but somehow the failure of this relationship, more than all his other failures, tormented him. He believed that he and Katie had had the possibility of a genuine intimacy. The child was a symbol of that hope; he suddenly wanted it, and wanted her, very much indeed.

He sat up in bed. He reached out, picked up the phone, and asked for an international line. He dialled again the hotel in Asunción. Once again they said that the señora was not staying at the hotel but that they could take a message for her. In despair, he hung up.

His guide book said that in the south of Buenos Aires there is an old working class quarter by the Riachuelo canal where the old port used to be, called La Boca, the mouth. The
barrio
was famous for its brightly painted sheet-iron houses, made from materials taken from abandoned ships; artists had come to the area and added their pictures and sculptures to the vivid scene.

Dmitry went there with an old friend, Anatoly Makushkin, who was Scientific First Secretary at the Russian Embassy in Buenos Aires. He had phoned him in the morning; they had not seen one another for several years, but the moment Anatoly's deep voice answered the phone, Dmitry found himself on the same wavelength, echoing his expressions of delight.

‘Why didn't you contact me sooner? I have been half expecting it. You are at this nuclear energy conference of course.'

‘Of course.'

‘What time are you free? I can come over and meet you.'

‘Oh, I think from four o'clock. Shall I see you at the conference centre?'

They met at four-thirty. The two men embraced warmly, kissing both cheeks, then stood back from one another. They were the same age, but Anatoly could easily have been a decade older; he was slightly overweight, and his hair was greying. He examined Dmitry's face shrewdly. ‘Well, you look all right,' he said, ‘You look very well. I'm glad. We were very shocked to read what happened, you must have had a terrible time. Did you get my letter?'

‘Yes. Eventually. Thanks.'

‘Have you seen anything of the city?'

‘Not much. I thought we could go to La Boca.'

‘It's very picturesque. We can walk there, and then find somewhere for a drink or a coffee.'

So now they were wandering in the late afternoon down the narrow streets, heading for the waterfront. ‘There's a place here that might amuse you,' said Anatoly. The bar, in a street near the water's edge, had a red blind on which was painted its name: ‘
El Samovar de Rasputín
.' A mural of the mad monk and cherubs flanked the door. They ordered beer and sat at a table under a chandelier; the walls were covered with pictures and artefacts; an old sign showed the place had once been an antique shop. The man at the next table watched them; he listened as if he could understand what they were saying, making Dmitry nervous. He and Anatoly chatted rather desultorily about the conference, about life in Buenos Aires, Vienna, and events back home. They finished their beers; Anatoly offered to buy another but Dmitry declined. He said, ‘It's a bit oppressive here. Let's go and have a walk.'

Once they had left the bar and were strolling down towards the water, Dmitry felt able to open up a little more, ‘Tolya, have you been following this Paraguayan rocket project? You don't know what's going on there, do you? Presumably you know what Wolfgang Richter is up to now.'

‘Ah, yes,' said Anatoly. ‘None of it is really secret now. It has been in all the papers. He launched his third rocket this week; apparently it was not entirely successful. Now he is building an even bigger one.' He paused to offer Dmitry a cigarette, which Dmitry declined, then lit one himself. ‘Well, so far it has looked rather promising for Richter. The problem is that we have no links with Paraguay at all, there is no way we can put any pressure on them to stop. But there seems to be growing concern about him. Probably the terms of this contract, of which he was so proud, will be his downfall. It has made many enemies in Paraguay, as well as outside. But we are leaving any active steps to the Americans. I believe there have been some contacts between the KGB and the CIA over this. You know, we are even working together a little bit these days.'

‘But can't the Americans put pressure on Rodriguez?'

‘No, I'm not sure. It seems obvious that they could stop it at any time. But there are rumours about other activities which the company is involved in - maybe they want to string it along, see what happens, just until the time it actually becomes dangerous. In the old days, of course, we would have accused them of being in co-operation and so on, indeed I believe that has been the official line, but I think they are really just as anxious to be rid of Richter as we are.'

‘What I don't understand,' said Dmitry, ‘Is why the Americans let him start up in Paraguay. It's practically in their back pocket.'

‘Well, the deal was signed by Stroessner, in his last days in power,' said Anatoly. ‘The Americans had cut off aid then because of human rights abuses. So far Rodriguez has refused to be swayed. There has been diplomatic pressure, but the problem is he isn't actually doing anything illegal, not yet, anyway, not that we can prove. Did you see,' Anatoly gave a chuckle, ‘That Richter had offered to solve the world's nuclear waste problem by shooting spent reactor rods into space? At the cost of several million dollars each, I gather.'

Dmitry laughed with him. ‘Yes, he told me that idea himself, at a café in Vienna. I wasn't sure that he was serious.'

‘You met Richter in Vienna?' Anatoly looked at Dmitry with amazement.

‘He was a friend of one of my colleagues, Bob Haynes, an American, who I believe is now working for Richter in Paraguay.'

Anatoly looked at him sharply for an instant, then continued to walk, his eyes cast downwards. They reached the river's edge and stood there, looking out over the water. The shipyard itself was in decay; more of the boats lay on their sides, exposing their battered hulls, than were afloat; there was little sign of life. The late afternoon sunlight made the colours of the boats more intense; a light wind clipped the rigging of the boats against the masts with a rapid ping-ping-ping. The wind brought with it the rank smell of the polluted water; after a few minutes they turned away.