This Shared Dream (16 page)

Bette, thankful that her gun was now in her pocket, took them from her purse.

He perused them. “Berlin!” He looked up, smiling. “My mother lives there.”

Using her flawless Berlin accent, Bette chatted with him about the Berlin neighborhood where his mother lived. When Hadntz produced her papers, he frowned, then looked at her with suspicion. “A professor?” He shook his head and handed them back.

To Bette, he said, “You are staying at the Imperial? You must return to your hotel immediately. It is not safe to be out this night.” He pointed. “Ringstrasse is that way. When you get there, turn left.”

He glared at Hadntz. “And you, Doktor Doktor Hadntz. Go back to Hungary.”

As they walked toward Ringstrasse, Bette said, “Doktor Doktor?”

“Germans give you the titular benefit of all of your doctorates. They like titles.”

“No intellectuals wanted here.”

Hadntz snorted. “I grew up in Vienna, unlike that German soldier. I went to school here. He, and all of these Germans, are a foreign army occupying my country.”

They walked quickly, and finally caught sight of the Imperial, one of Vienna’s finest hotels, blazing not with fire but with light. Several black sedans idled in front of the hotel. The doorman admitted them, nodding at Bette. In the posh lobby, two men chatted over brandy. “That is Himmler, head of—”

“The SS,” Bette finished. “He checked in three days ago. He prefers beer with his caviar. I attended a party he gave last night.”

“And you heard nothing of their plans? What a waste of time.”

Bette’s room was on the third floor. After looking up and down the empty hallway, Bette unlocked her door. The wall sconce was dim, and served only to keep them from tripping over furniture as the two women crossed to the French doors and looked out over the city, where orange tongues of fire flared, block after block, in wanton destruction that was a complete contrast to the safe, luxurious refuge room from which they watched.

“Dulles certainly knows how to spend money,” Hadntz said after a moment, turning to survey the shadowed, but obviously elegant, room.

“I’m an heiress from Berlin.”

Hadntz opened the French doors, stepped onto the narrow balcony, and stood in silence, gripping the railing. Bette saw tears, and anger, in her dark eyes, caught in the light from the sconce when she turned.

“You are young,” she said. “But I think you’ll do.”

“I always have,” said Bette. Now it was her turn to use an ironic tone.

Hadntz stepped back inside, closed and locked the doors, and drew the drapes. “Turn on the lights.” She removed her hat and put it on a mahogany side table next to an art deco lamp, and then undid her hair. She sat on the teal-colored silk couch and began to unbuckle one of her high heels. Her hair fell across her face like a veil as she spoke. “There are many things that I must tell you, Miss Elegante. I will be here all night.” She shrugged off her coat and crossed her stockinged feet on the coffee table in front of her. “We will need dinner, and several of their best bottles of wine.”

Bette picked up the phone and ordered grilled fish for both of them, a pot of coffee, and specified the wines, two German, and two French. She also ordered a bottle of Scotch and four packs of Fatima cigarettes.

All of those were useful, that night, while Dr. Eliani Hadntz educated Bette about neurochemistry, quantum physics, research into human violence, and genetics.

Bette realized, much later, that some of the information that Dr. Hadntz had used to develop the device she claimed would end war, had come from other, future, timestreams.

But at this point, Hadntz was still working on her device. It was not ready. She simply wanted to prepare Bette.

Eliani Hadntz had a quiet, yet forceful and convincing manner. She drew diagrams on hotel stationery, and Bette soon called for a ream of paper. If Bette did not understand, Hadntz moved back, step by step, until she arrived at a common point of departure. Bette’s education had been eclectic, beginning at a state school in Michigan, continuing at Duke, and finishing at Cambridge. She had usually been the only woman in the largely technical and scientific classes she had taken, and had some background in the areas feeding into Hadntz’s many-threaded device, but much that the woman talked about was completely new to Bette, and she suspected that it was known only by highly specialized chemists, physicists, and biologists—and that, moreover, few of them knew what the others knew. Hadntz also gave Bette stunning news: Lise Meitner, a physicist who had lately fled Nazi Germany in fear of her life, had just confirmed the possibility of atomic fission: an atomic bomb was possible.

Hadntz had a different chain reaction, one of empathy and altruism, in mind. And she had hard physical plans to create the initial device, which would then replicate and go on to change the baseline of humans from one of constant war to one of constant peace, productivity, and intellectual expansion.

She left, just before dawn, taking all the papers with her. She told Bette that, for her own safety, but, much more important, for the sake of the Device, that she would probably not have much direct contact with her in the future. But she planned to make use of Bette, who agreed to be on call. Hadntz was setting up a network, trying to think about all possibilities that might arise, including her own death.

Bette stood on her private balcony at the Imperial, bundled against the cold in her opera coat, drinking bitter coffee. Smoke from burnt Jewish homes, businesses, and synagogues blotted out the sunrise. Its acrid smell, and a small whirlwind of burnt debris swirling down Ringstrasse, presaged a deeper, more universal destruction, a flame that might spread from the sickness in Germany, which had now overtaken Austria, and engulf the world. Bette knew it. Everyone knew it. Yet all the world’s leaders wanted to deny its imminence. Churchill, alone and ridiculed, had been sounding the alarm.

Bette brooded, realizing the truth of Hadntz’s predictions, which seemed like unavoidable consequences, given what she knew, and far from mystical. Yet somehow, Hadntz reminded Bette of the figure of Blind Justice: one weight pan freighted with the awful density of humanity’s murderous history, the other with her brilliant, probably impossible, Device.

After her night of coffee, cigarettes, whiskey, and extreme ideas rendered as scientifically achievable, two opposing ideas thrust themselves forward.

One was the convoluted hate-riven atrocity titled
Mein Kampf,
through which she had slogged, trying to get a clue about what drove Hitler’s murky thought process. It had filled her mind with a Frankensteinian monster much more horrible than Shelley’s original vision.

The other was a poem by the Irish mystic, AE:

Out of a timeless world

Shadows fall upon time,

From a brightness older than Earth:

A shadow the soul may climb.

I climb by the timeless stair

To a brightness older than time.

If Hadntz’s Device was actually created, and if it worked, then beyond the destroyed city she surveyed from the balcony she could almost glimpse, in the ideas Hadntz put forth with such certainty, a timeless stair, shimmering beyond sight, which just might surmount these deep and fearful shadows. Hers was a stair built to the highest standards of what humanity might possibly achieve, designed by a strange architect who had imbibed of a mixture of astounding knowledge, to synergistic effect.

Exhaustion blotted out Bette’s image, so that all she saw now, looking down on the Ringstrasse, were shards of shattered glass dull beneath a heavy sky, reflecting emptiness: The ruins of civilization as she, and many others, knew it.

*   *   *

At the end of September 1946, Bette took a train to Berga, a small town in occupied East Germany. That was the day she decided to go home.

She wore a Party uniform—a well-worn skirt, a white blouse, and a jacket with Party insignia. She had a good number of forged papers with her in a flat leather bag worn over her shoulder. Bureaucracies loved documentation.

It had been a long war. She had shepherded the development of Hadntz’s Device throughout. She had been a superlative spy.

She had fallen in love with Sam Dance.

She had set love aside, because, although countries had surrendered and treaties had been signed, the war continued. There was no shooting, not right now, not with atomic bombs on the table. But the war went on. She had been working as a double agent in the Soviet Union for a year. Today, she was collecting evidence for German prisoner-of-war atrocities that were coming up for trial.

Hours later, in a cemetery filled with dead prisoners of war, she leaned against a linden tree and sank to the ground.

She had been on a similar grassy hillside, covered with wildflowers, a few days ago, where she had walked past the new grave of a cousin on her mother’s side. The cousin had been a Russian tank commander in the war, and then the Soviets shot her for some reason or other; it never mattered what for or why to them. Because Bette was a spy, she had to pretend that she had no idea who the new grave was for. She had, by now, spent almost ten years in Europe, the last few months in the bitter atmosphere of Stalingrad.

And then, there was Eliani Hadntz. Bette had ignored several of her attempts at communicating, just as she had ignored queries from her superiors about Hadntz, the Device, and Sam.

As she sat there, looking out across the bucolic-looking village where so many horrors had taken place, she thought about Hadntz’s Device and all her crazy claims for the way it would change humanity for the better.

Oh, yes, Dance and his buddy Wink had had some success with it, in their little shop in Gladbach. So much success—what was it, a burst of light or energy or something?—that Bette had actually entertained some hope for the past year.

Silly of her, eh?

She burst out laughing, then cried, then laughed some more until she gasped for breath. How absurd to think that a mere invention, no matter how complex, could change such overwhelming evil. Brutality welled from the ground from here to the Middle East; the very soil was made of human bones. She had probably walked over the unmarked graves of millions of dead since she had arrived. What made Eliani Hadntz think that she could change anything?

The vast history of this millennium-long crush of humanity on the landmass of Europe was, suddenly, deeply overwhelming. She thought of Sam, and, surprising herself, veered into a mood that was alien to her. Sam, or her own surviving brothers, could have been buried here, right here where she sat. The Americans brought here had landed in Le Havre only a few weeks earlier. They had no idea that all the territory Germany claimed was full of death camps, or that they might end up in one of them.

How could anything but more violence and revenge, come from this? What would unwind in the future—if not here, then elsewhere in the world, forever? Could anything ever change? The same extremes of human behavior manifested in the Third Reich now ran through the Soviet Union, an unending plague.

She shook a handkerchief from her pocket, blew her nose and mopped at her face. Then she lit a cigarette, stood, and brushed off her skirt. It was late afternoon. She had intended to stay the night in this wretched town, but she just couldn’t stand to be here a minute more. Not in East Germany, not in Leningrad, not in France. Not in Europe at all.

She had to get home.

*   *   *

In 1964, in her second time line, Bette lifted her head from the steering wheel. Stars glittered in the frigid sky over Battle Creek.

She depressed the clutch, ignited the engine, shifted into first gear, and eased onto the street.

She drove toward her small, bleak apartment, one of many small, bleak apartments in which she had left no trace during her long career in intelligence. She would gaze at the black-and-white pictures of her children, which were like chips of gold that she had hidden in the lining of her briefcase. Then she would fall asleep.

Bette

May 7

B
ETTE WAS STARTLED
back to the Halcyon House kitchen in June 1991, by a footstep on the porch.

Still holding Bootstrap Jack, whose prototype had stood on the desk of the General Mills executive so long ago, she slipped over to the open door to the attic steps, then heard the slap of mail falling through the front door flap onto the foyer floor.

Just the mailman.

Hurrying up the narrow back stairs, she reached the third floor, gathered her dirty clothes from the bathroom floor, and returned to the attic. Back inside the refuge of the pink bedroom, she turned yet another bookshelf on pivots to reveal a small room containing a bank of electronics. She sat down and flipped the main switch. The ancient computer, from the early 1980s, flickered on. The radio amplifier did not work. She removed the lid and replaced two tubes with new ones from a supply drawer, and it lit up. She turned on the microphone that was in the library and got a green light. The kitchen and living room were live as well. They had not bugged their children’s rooms. A reel-to-reel tape recorder sat on the floor.

On the computer screen was a radar sweep, of sorts. A line swept around and around, deforming at a certain point. Somewhere in Georgetown was as accurate as she could get. Not good enough. She needed more sophisticated equipment, and she was reasonably sure that it existed in this timestream. All the other technological markers were here. She’d have to learn more about how things worked here to find the best way to do it. Opening the top of an old Victrola, she removed two thousand dollars, then reconsidered and added another thousand, in large and small bills, then closed up the electronics room.

Inside the closet of the pink bedroom, she put the money into a leather purse from the attic, which also held a stashed pistol, ammunition, and a birth certificate for one Jane Smith from Arkansas, with which to get a current ID. Opening yet another pivot door in the closet, she descended a hidden staircase that opened in the basement. The doorway was concealed by a built-in shelf. She shut the shelf, full of cobwebbed cleaning supplies, and let herself out the basement door.