The Einstein Prophecy

CHAPTER SIX

From New York Harbor to Grand Central Station, then onto a train to a place called Princeton Junction. Once there, Simone and her father had been shuttled to a single railcar that traveled on a short spur line, no more than a mile or two long, which terminated at the foot of the university campus. The only other passengers were three businessmen with loosened ties coming home from their offices, and some boisterous students plainly returning from a wild excursion to the city.

“Where to?” the taxi driver asked, piling their luggage into the trunk of the bright yellow car.

Simone didn’t know how to reply. There hadn’t been time to figure out where they would be spending the night. “We will need a hotel,” she said, and the driver said—“Sure thing”—and pulled away from the station.

Simone’s first impression of New Jersey was trees — great towering trees everywhere, making a canopy overhead, shading the old stone walls and towers of the university buildings that rose along the side of the road. The late-day sun touched the leaves, already edged in red and gold, and she could only imagine how beautiful they would be in another few weeks — provided, of course, that she and her father were still there to see them.

This part of the plan had not yet had time to gel in her mind. Too much had happened. In the harbor, the wounded soldiers had disembarked first — some limping under their own power down the gangway, others carried on stretchers to a fleet of ambulances, busses, and cabs lined up at the dock. Once their ranks had thinned out, Simone had taken her father by the elbow and navigated down the ramp, followed by the officious ensign whose arm she had snagged on the flooded deck of the Seward. He had since become her greatest admirer, and asked how long she would be staying in the city.

“I have shore leave for a week,” he volunteered.

“We’re not sure of our plans,” she’d said, not wanting to discourage him too much before their luggage had been unloaded from the ship.

He scrawled a phone number on a scrap of paper and assured her that if a woman answered, it wasn’t his wife. “It’s my mom’s place,” he said.

Simone saw a mountain of boxes and supplies piling up toward the bow of the ship, and looking up, watched a huge winch lowering a green net filled with yet more. After depositing her father and their bags in a taxi, and telling the driver he could run the meter until she got back, she ambled, as unobtrusively as she could, toward the spot where the cargo was being collected. Lurking between two stacks of cartons, she waited as the winch made one or two more drops. But how many, she wondered, would there be? She was sure to be noticed if she stood there for long: The last of the vehicles were now leaving the dock, bound for hospitals in the city, and she could see that the ensign who had asked her out had been dragooned into transporting some of the unloaded freight. In a minute or two, he’d pass right by her with his empty dolly.

The winch dipped down one more time, then, creaking loudly, swung out wide, with a wooden crate in its net. Even from here, she could see the red-lettered pouch affixed to its side, containing the elusive delivery instructions. A navy officer with a megaphone was waving directions to the operator up top, but the net seemed to catch in a sudden wind off the sea. The armature shivered, and the net twisted around and around, almost as if something were trying to escape from the box.

“No, slow it down!” the officer bellowed. “You’re going to lose it!”

But the net kept twisting and turning. Then the winch itself suddenly groaned and tilted over the bulwark.

“Watch out!” the officer shouted, leaping behind a flatbed truck.

The armature doubled over. The net swung like a pendulum across the dock, catching the ensign square in the chest as he turned around and looked up. He was knocked off his feet like a bowling pin, his dolly skittering across the cement. The net came halfway back again before the crate ricocheted off the hood of a truck with an awful scraping noise and stopped a few feet from the body of the sailor.

There was a moment of stunned silence on the dock, before Simone and a few of the stevedores raced to the ensign’s side, but it was clearly of no use. What was left of his chest looked like a squashed plum. The officer, his white uniform sprayed with blood, knelt over him, saying, “Jesus Christ… Jesus Christ,” over and over again.

How she could focus on anything but the tragedy, Simone didn’t know, but her head turned. On the side of the shipping crate, the duct-taped pouch had been torn loose, and its contents were spilling out. The breeze was catching the papers already; she reached out and snatched one that was hovering in the air like a butterfly. It was crumpled, but not so much that she couldn’t read the delivery instructions: “Department of Art and Archaeology, Princeton University. Attn: Professor Lucas Athan.”

The cab pulled up outside a well-maintained hotel done in the Colonial style — red brick, white wooden shutters — but when they got out, Simone’s father wanted to simply sit on the bench outside for a few minutes and catch his breath. Worry filled her. The last few days had been too hard on his heart.

Simone followed their luggage into the lobby, and at the reception desk a young woman dressed in a frilly white blouse said, “How may I help you?” Her name tag read “Mary Jane.”

“I will need either two rooms, or, if you have it, better yet a two-bedroom suite. I’m traveling with my father.”

Mary Jane said, “Oh,” and after glancing at Simone again, started riffling through the pages of the reservation book. “Is this your first visit to Princeton?” she said, without looking up again.

“Yes.”

“Did you come a long way?”

It seemed an odd question, but Simone answered it, anyway. “Yes. All the way from Cairo, as a matter of fact.”

“Where?” the girl asked.

“Egypt,” Simone said.

“Oh,” Mary Jane said again, before excusing herself. “I’ll be right back. I just have to check on our availability.”

Simone looked around the lobby, appointed with Oriental rugs, brass lamps, and oil portraits of Revolutionary War heroes. The rooms would not be cheap, but money wasn’t an issue. Her mother’s family had largely cut their daughter off after she’d made the colossal faux pas of marrying an Arab, but her father’s family had been very successful cotton merchants for generations. Simone stepped outside to check on her father.

“Better now,” he said, using the cane to climb to his feet. “I would like to lie down and take a nap before dinner.”

“That sounds like a good idea,” Simone said. She escorted him through the door and helped him into a wingback chair in the reception area. “They’re just checking on the rooms.”

A manager now stood behind the desk, wearing a burnt-orange jacket and matching slacks. He smiled at Simone as she returned to the desk, but she noticed that his eyes kept flicking over her shoulder to her father resting with his eyes closed and his ebony walking stick propped against an end table.

“Good evening, Miss…?”

“Rashid. Simone Rashid.”

“Ah, yes,” he said. “Mary Jane tells me you are visiting America.”

Simone hadn’t said exactly that, but it wasn’t worth arguing about.

“Are you guests of the university?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she replied. Although no invitation had been extended yet, she certainly meant to weasel her way in. But what was this all about? Was security this tight in American hotels now?

“May I see your passport?”

Simone dug it out of the canvas shoulder sack she carried in place of a purse, and set it down beside the gleaming brass bell. Mary Jane glanced at its distinctive crocodile- green cover as if she’d never seen anything so exotic. The girl looked no more than seventeen years old, so maybe she hadn’t.

The manager flicked over the front pages of the passport, but his eyes returned to her dozing father, his face as brown and wrinkled as a walnut shell.

What was taking so long? “If you don’t have a suite, two rooms close to each other will be fine,” Simone reiterated.

“Exactly,” the manager said, turning a page of the ledger back and forth. “But I’m not sure we have anything like that available at this time.”

Simone hadn’t seen a single guest coming in or out.

“Might I recommend an inn just a few blocks from here? It’s called the Peacock, and if you’d like, I can telephone them and see if they have something free.”

And then, like a sledgehammer, it hit her. The hotel didn’t want them because it wasn’t one hundred percent sure that they were white. While Simone’s tan skin had given them pause, her father’s darker complexion had sealed their fate.

The manager was already picking up the telephone on the counter.

“You needn’t bother,” Simone said frostily, pressing the button down on the receiver. She would not be run off. “We’ll be staying right here.”

“Yes, well, we really have nothing suitable—”

“Then we’ll take something unsuitable.” She would sleep in a broom closet now, just to force the issue.

“There’s only one small room that—”

“We’ll take it,” she said, turning the registration book on its swivel and signing it on the first line left blank. “Send in a cot.”

The manager looked like he had no idea what to do next, and Mary Jane was studying him to see how she should handle awkward situations like this in the future.

“What’s the room number?” Simone asked brusquely.

“Don’t you want to know the room rate?” he asked. “It’s—”

“I don’t care. What’s the number?”

Reluctantly, he took a key from the board behind him and said, “Three fourteen.”

“Thank you,” she said, snatching the key and then banging on the brass bell herself. A Negro bellhop magically appeared. At least they allowed colored people to work there, though even he looked a bit confused as he picked up their bags. She gently shook her father to wake him, then followed the luggage trolley to the elevator. She was so angry she could barely breathe, but she was not about to let her father know of the shabby treatment they had just received. He had never been to the United States before, and she did not want to have to explain to him that while the world was fighting a so-called “master race” intent on ruthlessly exterminating people that they judged inferior or impure, America itself was still a stronghold of racism and discrimination. She just hadn’t expected to find it here, in a northern university town that was home to some of the leading intellectuals in the world, like Albert Einstein and Kurt Gödel and Thomas Mann.

But so she had. As the elevator made its slow ascent, she slumped against the back wall, suddenly as weary as her father.