The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

On the gigantic movie screen of Radio City Music Hall, often billed as the “Showplace of the Nation,” Gene Tierney, improbably playing a Sicilian girl, was about to be kissed by John Hodiak, playing the American major entrusted with replacing a church bell stolen by the Fascists. The film was A Bell for Adano, based on the best-selling novel by John Hersey, and the minute Simone had spotted the ad in the New York Times, she had insisted they attend.

“What could be more appropriate for a former CRC man?” she’d said that morning while they finished a late breakfast at their hotel. For good reason, all of their breakfasts had been taken late. “Not only that, I’ll get to see this famous music hall before we have to go home.”

That was fine with Lucas; this was the last day of their honeymoon, and he had already shown her just about every other tourist sight he could think of. They had climbed to the top of the Statue of Liberty and taken the elevator 102 floors to the observation deck of the Empire State Building. They had strolled through the Central Park Zoo and the crooked streets of Greenwich Village, walked across the Brooklyn Bridge, and taken in a jazz session at a nightclub up in Harlem. For several days, they had virtually camped out in the Metropolitan Museum, where they could indulge their mutual passion for art and antiquities. Unsurprisingly, Simone had been especially enthralled by the galleries filled with Egyptian exhibits, though she’d also been vexed that so many of her country’s national treasures had been absconded with and were now on display in this foreign land.

The matinee performance was almost full, not only because the movie had just opened, but because the vast airy auditorium was preferable to the sweltering city outside. The temperatures had been in the eighties, and showed no sign of abating. Simone was scrunched down in her seat, her shoulder resting on Lucas’s shoulder, when they heard banging on the doors to the lobby.

Someone in the audience yelled, “Shut up! We’re watching a movie in here!”

The banging got louder. A pair of doors flew open, and an usher, in a red suit and braided cap, ducked his head in. For a moment, Lucas thought a fire might have broken out, but then he heard what the usher was shouting. “The war is over! The war is over!”

Other doors opened, and other ushers issued the same proclamation.

As the word filtered through the audience, people jumped to their feet, some hollering for joy, others weeping and embracing the strangers sitting next to them.

Simone straightened up in her seat and looked at Lucas. “You think it’s true?”

All week long, rumors had been circulating that the Japanese were about to surrender. The atomic bomb that destroyed Hiroshima had been followed days later by another, this one dropped on a place called Nagasaki. But still, Emperor Hirohito had refused to accept the Potsdam Declaration, and the war had dragged on. The United States faced the prospect of launching a massive land invasion of the Pacific islands, and the enormous number of casualties that such a campaign would incur.

Hundreds, then thousands, of people were pouring up the aisles of the massive auditorium, nearly trampling each other in their haste to get outside and celebrate the news. Lucas and Simone joined them, swept up in the tide like leaves on a rushing stream.

On Sixth Avenue, fire alarms were ringing everywhere, taxi cabs were blasting their horns, office workers were leaning out of upper-story windows, tearing up papers and throwing the confetti to the breeze.

“Now I think it’s true,” Lucas said, hugging Simone.

Everyone was heading past them, down toward Times Square, where the news would be officially confirmed by the electronic ticker wrapped around the third floor of the towering newspaper building. Holding her by the arm, Lucas navigated through the crowd, threading his way across Fiftieth Street to Seventh Avenue, then down the jammed sidewalk, and into the street — where all the cars and buses were stopped dead, and people were dancing between the lanes — before finally arriving in the square itself.

Always a popular gathering spot for servicemen — there were military service posts all around, including the Pepsi-Cola Center where sailors on leave could shave and shower and write letters home — the place at that moment looked like a cross between the deck of an aircraft carrier and a Mardi Gras celebration. Sailors were tossing their white caps in the air, and others were grabbing all the pretty girls who passed by and stealing a kiss. In the open square, one of them had just snagged a young nurse in her white uniform, and, as a short guy armed with a Leica snapped their picture, bent her backward over his arm in a real movie-star clinch. The kiss lasted for several seconds before the sailor let the poor girl up for air, the shutterbug moved on, and a few other spectators gave the pair a round of applause.

Most eyes, however, were riveted on the ticker.

The block letters scrolling around the building read, “VJ! VJ! VJ!” Victory over Japan. And then, in case there was still any doubt, “The Japanese Government in Tokyo Has Accepted the Allied Surrender Terms.” The announcement was followed by six asterisks, representing the six branches of the armed forces.

“Amy’s going to get her dad back,” Simone said, thinking of how jubilant Mrs. Caputo and her daughter must be feeling right then.

“There are going to be a lot of Amy’s.”

“Can you believe it?” a guy said, clapping Lucas on the shoulder, and in acknowledgment of his black patch, saying, “You did your part, pal!”

A group of teenage girls in the subway entrance sang, in perfect harmony, “America the Beautiful.”

A soldier in khakis, clinging to the top of a lamppost with one arm, wildly waved a flag with the other.

An old woman handed out tulips from a bouquet in her arms.

From every bar around the square — of which there were plenty — a chorus of cheers billowed out every time the doors swung open.

“It’s going to be a noisy night in New York,” Lucas said.

“Even sleepy little Princeton will be up late tonight.”

“We’d better go back and retrieve our bags,” Lucas said, glancing at his watch. “Our train leaves at five.”

Arm in arm, they turned back toward the Astor Hotel, where they were staying at the special rate reserved for veterans and active-duty servicemen, then made their way through the rejoicing crowds to the train station. After purchasing their tickets from a grinning clerk who insisted on shaking Lucas’s hand, they plopped onto the last pair of seats available. Someone had left behind a folded copy of the New York Times. Even on board, the revelry continued, with celebrants parading up and down the aisle, hooting and hollering, passing around cigars and silver flasks of whiskey. It wasn’t until the train had left the city and was passing into the flat, industrial hinterlands of New Jersey that everyone finally returned to their seats, and the racket died down. The air in the car was stifling, and Lucas shoved the dirty window open the few inches it would allow.

Simone pinched the top of her blouse and flapped it to cool herself off. “It’s like being back in Cairo.” Laying her head against his shoulder, she said, “Wake me when we get there.”

Opening up the newspaper that had been left on the seat, Lucas saw on the front page a photograph of the Nagasaki explosion, and read the description of the mushroom cloud that had erupted over the city days before. “Early estimates,” the paper reported, “put the loss of life at forty thousand.” What must it have been like, he wondered, to be caught beneath that deadly blast? What kind of horror was it to be engulfed in such an inferno? “A fiery column rose up from ground zero, a burning cloud that filled the sky and billowed out for a radius of no less than five miles.” The words seemed familiar somehow, and it took a few seconds before he remembered why. It was the account from Saint Anthony, of the Roman army being defeated by a “mighty pillar of flame, like a red rose with petals that spread in a burning cloud across the sky.” When Simone had read it to him one night, it had seemed so fantastical, almost poetic, but here was a picture of that very thing, and it wasn’t fantastical, or poetic, at all.

He wondered what Einstein thought of it. On the day Hiroshima had been bombed, the professor had retreated to his study, and only at dusk, when the mob of reporters had dispersed, had he dared to come across the street to apologize for the disruption to Lucas and Simone’s wedding. Simone had already fallen fast asleep upstairs, still in her wedding clothes — they weren’t leaving for New York until the next morning — and Lucas had stepped out onto the porch for a cigarette.

He had never seen a man look so haunted. He offered him a cigarette, and the professor had gladly accepted, though he said that they had better take a walk so he could enjoy it without Helen spotting him.

“I think I can be forgiven for smoking on a day like this,” he said, as the two men ambled down the block. Even at twilight, the dense canopy of leaves overhead cast a pale green light over everything.

“The Japanese will have to surrender now,” Lucas said.

“Why?”

“Because it would be madness not to.”

“But that is precisely what war is. It is madness,” Einstein said, pinching the cigarette between two fingers. “Nothing less than madness.”

Lucas could hardly disagree — he had seen enough of it to know firsthand. The carnage had not been confined to Europe, or the Far East, though. When he had given the eulogy at Patrick Delaney’s memorial service, he had considered describing him as a casualty of war. A hero in the most genuine sense. But the work Delaney had been doing was still classified, and no one would ever know that he was killed by anything other than a freakish lightning strike.

Einstein, of course, knew better. After the terrible events of that autumn day, the professor and Lucas had come to be close friends, bonded by what they alone had witnessed in the boat on Lake Carnegie. Each of them held the knowledge tight. Einstein had alluded to having glimpsed “the face of pure evil,” and though Lucas had been sworn to secrecy — indeed, he still had the sense that Colonel Macmillan was keeping tabs on him — he had shared enough information about the ossuary to suggest where that ancient evil might have originated. Einstein, absorbing the strange tale, had said, “What is the line, from Shakespeare? ‘There are more things in Heaven and Earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy.’ Ja, that is it. More things than are dreamt of.” From the solemn expression on his lined face, Lucas knew that even the professor’s cosmology had taken a jarring blow.

Putting the paper down, Lucas laid his head back on the worn leather headrest, and closed his one good eye. Before he knew it, the heat and the rhythmic rocking of the train had lulled him to sleep. His mind traveled back to the iron mine near Strasbourg, to the land mine that had maimed him, to the ossuary that had followed him halfway around the world, and to the woman who had come into his life because of it. Somewhere in all of that, he sensed there was a pattern, a design, one that was sitting right in front of his nose but that he was simply too dim to see. In his sleep he was about to grasp it, about to understand his unwitting role in this great cosmic drama, when he felt a hand gently shake him awake, and the dream evaporated. A stringy young man in a conductor’s uniform, said, “Tickets, please.”

Lucas fished them out of his shirt pocket, and as they were punched, he noticed, alighting on the back of the seat in front of them, its iridescent wings spread wide, a fat and buzzing blue-bottle fly. He tried to wave it off without waking Simone, but failed.

“What is it?” she mumbled, stirring against his shoulder.

“It’s nothing,” he said as the fly made a lazy circle around their heads, and he rolled the newspaper into a viable weapon. “Go back to sleep.”

The fly made one more loop, then landed right back on the seat where it had been, rubbing its wings together. When the right moment came, Lucas struck.

“Gotcha,” he said, but when he looked at the paper for some telltale sign that he’d hit it, there was none.