The Rocket Man (9 page)

The woman had said that if Lieselotte didn't send her money she would give the story to the papers. Lieselotte had said that she would do no such thing and had hung up. Then the woman had phoned again. This time she had been in tears. She said that Müller had told her terrible lies. He had said he was going to leave his wife and hadn't done so. He had promised her money to keep quiet. She had told him she wasn't going to keep quiet. She had threatened Hans that she would tell his wife and he had told her if she did she would regret it.

Lieselotte had pleaded with her to stop, had said that it was destroying her, that she did not believe her, and that she could not be talking about her husband. She had said she was going to ring the police and if she called again she would have them trace the call. She had hung up; the woman hadn't called back again.

‘The trouble is, I really can't believe her,' said Lieselotte. ‘Perhaps I am naive, but I just can't believe it. Not Hans, not with a woman who sounds like that.'

Katie didn't know what to say. Would Bob react the same way, if he found out what she had been doing? She struggled to think of something sensible, something which would calm her friend, but she couldn't. ‘Have you told the police?'

Lieselotte said, ‘Yes, I called them. They said they would send someone round.' Her voice suddenly went flat.

‘Do you want me to come over?' asked Katie.

‘No,' said Lieselotte, ‘No, it's all right. My sister is here. We're going on Wednesday. I'll write to you. I knew you would hear about it from the office, I just wanted you to hear it first from me.'

Katie said her goodbyes, hung up and went back into the kitchen. Bob was standing there, staring out of the window.

Katie asked, ‘Bob, do you think it's true?'

‘I don't know.'

‘But you worked with Hans.'

‘Well, I didn't know him that well. It's possible, of course, when people are away so much, of course it is.'

‘Have you been unfaithful?' The words escaped her before she could stop herself; she was horrified, afraid he would turn the question back on her. But instead he laughed. He turned to her and embraced her. ‘Is that what's worrying you? No, of course not, honey. Why should I be, when I have you?'

When Dmitry heard the story from Hilde he felt somehow disgusted with everything. He didn't know what to think. Of course, if people were prepared to cover up something, if they were prepared, in an extreme case, to murder someone to silence them, they were not likely to shrink at paying some woman to lie and make an unpleasant scene like this to make it seem as if there had been a personal reason for the suicide. All the same, to destroy someone's image of their dead husband seemed the ultimate in cruelty. But then – perhaps he was completely wrong. It could be true. Didn't he himself know what emotional messes people could get into, people who on the surface were conventional, reliable. Why shouldn't this be true of Müller? He sat at his desk and stared at the wall in front of him. He wished again that he hadn't rung Eduardo Cruz.

He tried to think clearly. He couldn't be sure what was imagined and what was real. Everything was an impression; the expression on the face of Oliveira at the Valadares centre when he had said they had nothing to hide; the look in Müller's eyes when he had asked Dmitry if he could talk to him later at the hotel in São Paulo; the tone in Cruz's voice over the telephone. Did you know these things, or were they just imagined? He thought probably you knew. He had known that Katie wanted him from the first minute he had seen her, probably before she had realised it herself. He was usually right about people. Perhaps he should simply trust his instincts.

On the other hand, what could he do? He was never going to be able to prove anything. His first impulse had been to go and see the DDG again and tell him about this latest detail, but he knew that he would be in trouble for having spoken to Lieselotte, and he was already aware that he had made himself unpopular by repeatedly voicing his doubts about what had happened. Besides, it had revealed nothing. As far as Lascalles was concerned the business was closed.

Dmitry sighed. Of course, if there were a problem in Brazil, it could be sorted out behind the scenes without the IAEA ever getting wind of it. It was unlikely that the Brazilian military could get away with anything they might be doing for long. If something was going on, it was likely that the Brazilian authorities would discover it before the IAEA. They would simply sort things out internally. They would say there had been problems with their accounting, that sort of thing. The IAEA turned a blind eye to minor safeguards transgressions all the time. Or perhaps somebody could, behind the scenes, ask the head of the Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission to look into it. Perhaps he would mention this to the DDG.

Dmitry walked across the room and stared out of the window at the city lying under a thin layer of snow. The whole history of Brazil's parallel programme had been a maze of deception. In 1986 the military had gained greater control of the parallel programme when CNEN had been put under the direct authority of the National Security Council, which was made up of the President and heads of the armed forces, instead of the Ministry of Mines and Energy. When austerity measures had curbed spending on Brazil's nuclear programme, secret bank accounts had been set up abroad to make sure the military programme did not suffer. Various top nuclear energy officials in Brazil had acknowledged that they had been involved in clandestine trade to build the Valadares plant. This included declaring false end uses for German lathes for machining cylinders for gas centrifuges. The former chairman of CNEN had even publicly revealed that Brazil had obtained a wide variety of nuclear equipment by mislabelling them as ‘tractor parts' in the shipping documents.

Dmitry sat down at his desk again and rested his face in his hands. Everybody was aware of this. People had known about it for years. There had been criticisms of the whole West German nuclear deal; the US in particular had warned them against it, saying there was no guarantee that Brazil would not use the imported expertise for military uses. But since Brazil had not then acceded to the Nuclear Non- Proliferation Treaty there had been nothing much that could have been done about it by the IAEA. In a way, it was almost funny. It was farcical. You could shrug your shoulders about it and get on with the job and hope that nothing would come of it; indeed, hope, as seemed to be the case in Brazil, that governments would see sense and decide against the bomb for their own financial and political reasons. It was all right somehow as long as individuals did not come into it. But if things had got to the point where people were prepared to kill to cover up such goings-on, if a safeguards agreement was being deliberately and cynically breached, everything suddenly appeared quite different.

And why shouldn't they be prepared to kill? Enormous sums of money were at stake in nuclear trade. The military were already up to their necks in clandestine deals. There had been a long history of corruption. Perhaps one or two people had been bumped off already, in Brazil; little people who didn't matter. Perhaps a technician who had been prepared to talk had had an accident, been run over by a car or that sort of thing. Nobody would know or care about it. He knew it only mattered so much to him because he knew Hans Müller personally, had met and liked his distraught young wife.

The phone rang. Dmitry almost jumped, startled. He picked it up. It was Nihal, reporting on what he had found. Dmitry listened for a long time in silence. When Nihal had finished, he stayed silent for so long that Nihal had to ask him if he was still there.

Dmitry reached across his desk for his cigarettes. He thought for a moment, wondering whether it was necessary to say this, and then deciding, on balance, that it was best if he did. ‘By the way, Nihal, this is important – you won't tell anyone I suggested you look into this, will you?'

Katie, again, heard nothing from Dmitry. After a few days she could bear it no longer. She dropped Anna off early at kindergarten and rushed back to his flat, hoping to catch him before he left for work.

She waited for what seemed a long time before he answered the door. He was unshaven, wearing his dressing gown. He started, surprised to see her, and stood for a moment staring at her. Then he said, abruptly, ‘Come in.'

She walked into the room. Some music was playing quietly: some Beethoven string quartet, she recognised it from a long time ago. It was cold in the flat, as if the heating hadn't yet come on. He didn't say anything to her at once; for a moment she felt terribly uncomfortable, afraid that she might have disturbed him at a time when he wouldn't welcome it, or even, the thought crossed her mind for an instant, was with another woman.

She said, ‘I thought I owed you an explanation.'

‘What for?'

She looked at him. Within seconds they were kissing one another; within minutes they were in bed. It was too cold for either of them to want to get up afterwards. It had started to snow outside; the curtains were drawn back but it was still quite dark inside the room. He switched the bedside light on. They lay together in the small circle of light it cast, which emphasised the darkness all around them; he put his arm around her shoulder.

With his free arm, slightly awkwardly, he reached over to get a cigarette.

‘Do you have to smoke so much? Doesn't it worry you, that it'll kill you?'

Dmitry turned and looked at her. ‘Well, for you, I will try to smoke less. But this one, I must have.' He lit up and inhaled deeply. Leaning against him, Katie felt suddenly relaxed, intimate.

After a while she said, ‘You must tell me about yourself. I don't know anything about you.'

‘So you want my life story, do you?' He looked at the clock. ‘Well, I don't have to be in till ten. Maybe there's time to at least begin.'

He began to talk, slowly, slightly hesitantly, as if finding it hard to find the words to say in English things he had never before expressed in that language, perhaps even in his own. He told her about his father's death when he was eight; how things had been hard for them; how he had been determined to excel at school. He had worked hard at science because he was good at it, but also at languages, because it had been his dream to travel abroad. He achieved a gold medal at school and went to Moscow State University where he was a serious student, preoccupied with work. There he had his first serious girlfriend; she was from Cuba. She used to teach him Spanish. He had long ago lost touch with her. He had also met his wife, Masha, there though he hadn't actually gone out with her or married her until much later.

Katie asked, tentatively, ‘What went wrong with your marriage?' but he answered vaguely. They were wrong for one another. Katie must know what goes wrong with marriages – what had gone wrong with her own? It was not anybody's fault. Masha had not liked his work. Of course he had worked in secret research establishments; the Russians were absolutely obsessed with secrecy, and for her this was not easy. Well, what else was there to say? His life had been very boring. His career had followed a logical progression. He had worked hard, but had never particularly excelled at anything. If he had, he wouldn't have come to Vienna. The Russians didn't like to let their top scientists go abroad.

At that point she asked him, ‘Didn't you ever want to rebel?' and he looked at her, surprised. ‘Look,' he said, stubbing out his cigarette and turning towards her, ‘You had better not have any illusions about me. I was – how do you put it? – a clean-cut Russian boy, a Komsomol type, a Party member. Of course uranium enrichment is a sensitive area; it has as many implications for atomic weapons as for nuclear power. So I have had to be careful. Rebellion – whatever you mean by that – is not possible. Of course, inside, it is a different matter. You get sick of everything. You know the system is absolutely rotten, but on the other hand, you don't think much of the West either. So you just carry on, but inside… inside there are these little devils lurking.'