The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

With the film canister tucked into a battered briefcase, which was in turn tucked tightly under his uninjured arm, Lucas was almost out the door of the boardinghouse when Mrs. Caputo came fluttering down the stairs with an envelope in hand. “Wait,” she cried. “This came for you while you were gone!”

“I’m going over to the museum now,” Lucas said. “I’ll have to open it later.”

“I think you’d better open it now.”

“Why? Who’s it from?”

“You’ll see,” Mrs. Caputo said, barely able to conceal her excitement. “She brought it over herself.”

She?

Putting the briefcase down on the side table, Lucas obliged his landlady by ripping it open.

It was a handwritten note from Helen Dukas, Einstein’s secretary, urging him to stop and visit the professor at his earliest opportunity.

“They’re inviting you over, aren’t they?”

“Yes.”

“I bet he wants to thank you for saving his life at the stadium.”

Lucas needed no thanks for doing what anyone else in his shoes would have done, and he was eager to get to the art museum where he could get at the film projector.

“I want you to bring him something for me,” Mrs. Caputo said, ducking into the kitchen, then reemerging with a plate of brownies still warm from the oven and covered with a crumpled sheet of tinfoil.

Lucas was torn. He didn’t want to incur any delay right now, but an invitation — or was it a summons? — from one of the most famous men in the world wasn’t something you could easily dismiss. As if intuiting his thoughts, Mrs. Caputo shoved the plate of brownies into his hands and said, “Lucas, you absolutely have to go.”

Then she shoved him toward the door. “And you have to tell me everything when you get back — especially if he liked the brownies.”

With the plate in one hand and his briefcase in the other, Lucas trudged across the wet street. The storm had passed, but the rain still clinging to the leaves dripped on his head and shoulders. As he mounted the front steps of Einstein’s house, a feral cat ducked under them.

Fifteen minutes, Lucas told himself. He could spare fifteen minutes. He was debating what to put down so that he would have a free hand to knock, when, out of the corner of his good eye, he saw the lace curtains at the parlor window being pulled back. Then he heard quick footsteps, and a tall, thin woman — middle-aged, with straight dark hair and brows — opened the door with a warm smile.

“The professor will be so happy to see you,” she said, with a German accent only slightly less pronounced than her employer’s.

“It’s an honor,” he said, extending the plate. “And these are from Mrs. Caputo. She made them herself.”

“Thank you, but perhaps it’s best not to tell the professor. He’s on a strict diet.” She put the plate on a sideboard in the hall. “But I promise to give him one — just one — after his dinner. Please thank her. And now, if you will just wait here, I will tell the professor you have come.”

She started toward the stairs, then stopped as if she had forgotten something, and, turning, clutched his hands between her own. “I cannot tell you how grateful I am to you for coming to the rescue. How grateful we all are to you.”

She squeezed his hands, then bustled up the stairs. The house was silent, except for the ticking of a grandfather clock in the hall. When Helen reappeared on the landing and waved him on, he followed her to an open room, and before he knew it, he was inside, with the door closing softly behind him, and Einstein rising from a dilapidated armchair.

“Ah, my savior,” he said. “You should be wearing a suit of armor, ja?” He laughed. “A suit of armor.”

His hand, when they shook, was dry as papyrus, but the grip was surprisingly firm.

“They tell me you were injured.”

“Not badly,” Lucas replied.

“I am sorry for that. Very sorry.”

Lucas could hardly believe he was truly in the great man’s company, but if he doubted it, there was the blackboard, propped in front of a cluttered bookcase, covered with incomprehensible symbols and equations.

“Please to sit,” Einstein said, gesturing at a matching armchair, its seat covered with books and papers that the professor hastily gathered up and deposited on an equally messy desk. Several wafted onto the worn Oriental carpet, but he didn’t seem to notice or care.

Lucas sank into the soft leather cushion as Einstein plopped back down opposite him. He wore a loose black sweatshirt, and his white hair was as unruly as in all the newspaper photographs. When he put his feet up on the ottoman, Lucas noted that he was wearing leather sandals and no socks.

“I had never been to a football game before,” he said, brushing at his gray moustache.

“They don’t usually end that way.”

“I hope not,” Einstein said, a smile crinkling his face into a hundred lines. “I hope not. Still, I do not think that I will go to another game very soon.”

Of all the things Lucas might have expected, this was not one. Over the next few minutes, he found himself more and more relaxed in Einstein’s presence — the professor was plainly a man accustomed to, and adept at, putting other people at their ease, and he showed a genuine interest in who Lucas was, where he was from, what he had done in the war. The mention of the art recovery work conducted by the CRC, of which he had never heard, seemed to particularly intrigue him. He was clearly a cultured man, as even the violin and bow, resting on the window seat, attested.

More than once, however, Lucas saw his eyes alight on the breast pocket of his shirt, where a packet of Camels rested. Finally, unable to restrain himself any longer, the professor glanced at the closed door of the study, then leaned forward and, gesturing at the pocket, said, “You have cigarettes?”

“Yes,” Lucas said. “Would you like one?”

Einstein nodded vigorously, and as Lucas took one out, he got up and lifted the sash of the window looking onto the back garden. “Do not tell Helen. It is against the doctor’s orders.”

Lucas hesitated.

“But doctors, they do not know everything.”

Who was he to argue with Einstein? They settled back into their chairs. Einstein pinched his cigarette between his thumb and index finger, and inhaled deeply, eyes closed, savoring the taste and smell. A bit of ash trickled down the front of his sweatshirt.

Looking around for an ashtray, Lucas couldn’t help but notice the official military stamp on some of the papers that Einstein had thrown on the desk. Next to them, there was also an empty can of baked beans with a spoon sticking up out of it. Removing the spoon, he tamped the end of his cigarette into the can, then held it out to the professor, who did the same. Lucas left the makeshift ashtray perched, somewhat precariously, on the ottoman.

“A terrible thing,” Einstein said. “Monte Cassino.”

For a moment, Lucas didn’t follow. Why had this just come up? Monte Cassino, a Benedictine abbey about eighty miles southeast of Rome, had been destroyed in a pitched battle a few months earlier.

“Especially for a man whose job is to preserve great art.”

And then he understood. A beautiful structure in its own right, dating from the sixth century AD, the ancient monastery had held an irreplaceable library of papal documents and treasures dating from the Middle Ages and Renaissance. “Yes, it was.”

“It is as if mankind is trying to… obliterate itself, and every beautiful thing that it has made.”

The professor’s eyes, so full of cheer a few minutes earlier, had clouded over with sorrow, and Lucas’s mind flashed back to Strasbourg, and the Nazi plunder secreted in the iron mine. At least that particular cache had been salvaged from the wreckage of a ruined continent. He wished he was at liberty to share with Einstein the story of the ossuary and its miraculous odyssey — he sensed that it would be appreciated — but he did not dare. He could feel the spirit of Macmillan glowering in the air.

“Even if one fights on the side of angels,” the professor continued, “it can feel as if one is doing the Devil’s work. For years now, every day, it is all bombs and bullets, guns and planes, tanks and cannons, death and more death…” He trailed off, taking one last draw on the butt of the cigarette before leaning forward to drop it into the tin can. There was a tiny sizzling sound. “One must wonder, where will it all end?”

“It’s just a matter of time,” Lucas said. “The days of the Third Reich are numbered.”

“And the Fourth? What is to keep that from happening?”

For that, Lucas had no answer. No one did.

A breeze from the open window blew back the curtains and toppled the can onto the floor, spilling ash onto the rug.

“Ach, now Helen will know we have been smoking.”

“I’ll take the blame,” Lucas said, squatting down to brush the evidence back into the can.

“And I will let you take it,” Einstein said, flashing a crooked smile once again. There was something so beguilingly contradictory about him — a weathered, white-haired man who nevertheless retained in his demeanor the mischievous air of a child. In the bat of an eye, he could go from sage to schoolboy. “I can hide nothing from Helen,” he said, going to the window and fanning the air.

After righting the can, Lucas blew the remaining ash off some of the papers and gathered them up. Again, his eye skipped across the red TOP SECRET stamped atop several of the cream-colored pages, along with a simple letterhead emblazoned on the top sheet: THE WHITE HOUSE.

His eye jumped to the bottom, where he saw, below the warning “I fear they are close to success,” a hastily scrawled signature in bright blue ink. “Franklin D. Roosevelt.” He laid the letter carefully on the desk with all the others, just as Einstein shut the window and a firm knock came on the door.

“You are not smoking in there, are you, Professor?” Helen said.

“No, no,” Lucas volunteered. “It was just me.”

There was a pause before she replied, “You are a brave man, Mr. Athan. We knew that much already. But you do not lie well.”

Einstein whispered, “I told you so, ja?”

“Ja,” Lucas replied softly.

Einstein sat back, nodding, with a grin lifting the ends of his moustache. “She knows everything, that woman.”