Revelation

8 Camp L

Findhorn caught a whiff of cheap perfume. He tried to sound relaxed. 'Can we go?'

'Now? Not tomorrow?'

'I'd really like to get started. We can discuss your fees on the way.'

'Can't it even wait until after dinner?'

'Please!'

Romella gave him a slow, suspicious look while Findhorn inwardly fretted. She disappeared, leaving him at the open door.

'On the way to where?' she shouted through from a bedroom.

'My brother's flat. We have to get ourselves to Charlotte Square.'

She reappeared wearing a denim jacket over her pink sweater. She handed Findhorn his briefcase.

'You're sure you're not Jack the Ripper?' She was pulling a Peruvian hat down over her ears.

'Not even Jack the Lad.'

Stefi appeared from the kitchen, wiping her hands on a kitchen towel. It was half past four in the afternoon and she was still in her dressing gown. 'Do you like shish kebabs? My shish kebabs are…' She kissed her fingers.

'Another time.'

'You have to eat,' Stefi pointed out.

'I just have, thanks.'

Romella said, 'Okay, let's go.'

Out to the landing. She pulled the door behind her with a click. Someone was coming up the stairs. Findhorn froze.

'Evening, Mrs Essen.'

An old crone with a plastic bag in each hand; she grunted sourly as they passed. Findhorn exhaled with relief, felt weak at the knees.

The sky was dark grey and a light trickle of sleet was promising heavier stuff to come. 'We're about a mile from Dougie's flat. You don't sound like an Armenian.'

'Not surprising, considering I'm frae Glesca…' she momentarily affected a thick Cowcaddens accent '…I was brought up for some years in California. My folks still live there, in La Jolla. Dad's a lawyer. So your father's a Court of Session judge?'

'Yes. The whole family are lawyers. If you ever see a pink Porsche driving around Edinburgh, that's my younger brother, Dougie. He's with Sutcliffe & McWhirtle.'

'I've heard of them. They're criminal lawyers, aren't they?'

'Dad thinks they're criminals who just happen to be lawyers. They specialise in finding tiny legal loopholes and turning them into gaping chasms. They'll get you off anything — if you can afford them. My sister lives in Virginia Water with a barrister called Bramfield. He's rich, she's miserable and they're both drunk whenever I visit them.'

'But you didn't go in for law. Your card says you do polar research.'

'I've broken with the family legal tradition. Result, poverty.'

'I hope you can afford my fees.'

It was growing dark and car headlights were coming on. The gloom gave Findhorn an illusion of security. They passed Fat Sam's and turned left down Lothian Road. By the time they were crossing Princes Street the rush hour was in full swing and the light sleet had turned into a freezing downpour. They trotted along slushy pavements down to Charlotte Square. Here the grey terraced flats had doors with up-market brass knockers and brass plates proclaiming private medical practices, tax consultants and law firms with bizarre names. Interspersing these were private flats with names ending in Q.C. and enormous lamps in the windows.

Shivering with cold, Findhorn turned up a short flight of broad, granite stairs. He fiddled with some keys, opened a heavy door with a brass plate saying Mrs M. MacGregor, and switched on a light.

They were met by opulence and cold. Pink Venetian chandeliers threw glittering light over a patterned Axminster carpet, a little Queen Anne table with a pseudo-thirties telephone and half a dozen stained-glass doors. Jazz players cavorted amongst spiral galaxies and naked angels on a high vaulted ceiling. Stairs at the end of the corridor curved out of sight; they were guarded by a big wooden lion, and a scantily draped Eve was eating a marble apple on the first landing.

Romella laughed with delight and surprise. 'The Sistine Chapel!'

'Dougie's into surrealism,' said Findhorn. He turned a knob on the wall and there was a faint whump! from a distant central heating boiler. 'He's in Gstaad just now. He skiis there over the winter.'

Into a living room with a hideous black marble fireplace, a floor-to-wall bookcase, and a faded wallpaper effect expensively created with hand-blocked Regency patterns. Light cumulus clouds floated on a sky-blue ceiling.

'Wait till you see the bedrooms,' Findhorn said. He switched on a coal-effect fire and headed for a cocktail cabinet made up to look like a Barbados rum shack.

Romella flopped down on a cream leather settee. 'The bedrooms. A gin and tonic, please, and don't overdo the tonic'

Findhorn poured two glasses and sank into an armchair. Then he pulled the photocopies from his briefcase and put them on a glass table between them. 'There are people after these diaries. And they're looking for me. You ought to know that before you start because if you help me they might come looking for you too.'

Her low, gentle laugh was captivating. 'That must be the weirdest chat-up line ever. Certainly it's the most original I've ever had.'

'You can come and go as you please, but I'm staying here. I don't want to risk the streets more than I have to.'

'Here am I, all alone in a big empty flat with a weirdo. It's like something out of Psycho.' She said it jokingly but Findhorn thought there was a trace of uneasiness in her voice. 'You're kidding about people looking for you, right?'

'No, I'm serious. Maybe you want to pull out.'

'If you're into drugs…'

'Look, if it makes you feel safer why don't you ask your friend Stefi to come over? And Grim Jim and anyone else you want — a boyfriend if you have one. You can all stay here. There's plenty of room.'

'Okay, I'll ask Stefi. A little girl company might be good. The phone people aren't disconnecting us until tomorrow.' Romella waved a hand around. 'She'll love this. Jim's on a field trip over Christmas, he's a geology student.' She sipped at the drink. 'Are you going to tell me the real story on this stuff?'

'I am serious. There's something in the diaries. I have no idea what it is. But there are people very anxious to get their hands on them and I have been threatened. What I need is a translator to help me solve the riddle. And I have to stay out of sight while I'm about it. They're looking for me in Edinburgh and I can't risk railway stations and the like. I know I come out sounding like a mad axeman on the run from Carstairs.'

Romella was sitting unnaturally still. Findhorn waited. He added, 'I need your help. Your fees are secondary.'

'Let me phone Stefi.'

Findhorn headed for the kitchen, G&T in hand. He half-expected to hear the front door banging shut as Romella made her escape. A thirties-style light blue refrigerator held nothing more than a bar of Swiss chocolate, a few out-of-date yoghurts and a wedge of diseased Stilton.

Romella appeared; she had taken off her denim jacket. 'I've given Stefi the story. Wild horses won't keep her away — she's a bit of a romantic. She's Bulgarian and I suspect she has Romany blood from somewhere. She promises to keep out of our hair while we're translating. She's coming over with clothes and food and stuff.'

'Brilliant.' Findhorn saw no point in hiding his relief and he grinned.

'And she loves to cook.' Romella thought of the highest number she dared. 'I think I want to charge a hundred pounds a day for this one.'

'Agreed,' Findhorn said without hesitation. 'And Stefi gets twenty plus expenses for housekeeping.'

'Well now, Fred Findhorn B.Sc, Ph.D., Arctic explorer in a hurry, why don't we get started?'

The big living room was now comfortably warm and Findhorn sank into the settee beside Romella. He passed over the copy of The Times obituary. 'By way of background.' She started to read out loud:

She paused and looked at Findhorn, eyebrows raised.

'In more than one way,' Findhorn suggested. 'The Nazis were coming on stream.'

Romella picked up the thick sheaf of papers on the table. 'And here we are. The diaries start then.'

'He must have been twenty-three. I wonder what triggered him?'

Romella was flicking through the pages. 'A girl, maybe. A girl by the name of Lisa Rosen.' And translating in a low, melodious voice which Findhorn found curiously sensual, they at last entered the strange world of Lev Baruch Petrosian.

She was brown-haired, talkative and cheerful. The contrast with Petrosian's withdrawn, introverted character could hardly have been more stark.

The diaries recorded the slightly immature recollections and emotions of a young man finding his way in a disintegrating world. Lev's world was one of strident voices at street corners, of unemployed men prepared to march like robots behind swastikas and martial bands, of professors introducing seminars with 'Heil Hitler!' and adopting, either from conviction or self-preservation, the attitudes and postures of the Nazis.

They also increasingly mentioned the name Lisa.

One evening, Lisa took Petrosian to a social gathering at the house of her brother, Willy Rosen. The social gathering turned out to be a meeting of the local student communists. Lev politely refused the invitation to join. He attended several such meetings, arm in arm with Lisa, but always without commitment.

One snowy day in January 1933, Lisa failed to appear at the laboratory. When he visited her in her little apartment, Lev was horrified to find her in bed, her face black and blue and her eyes almost closed up. The Brownshirts had used fists and heavy sticks to break up one of the meetings. After that, it seemed to Lev the most natural thing in the world to join the communists, the only group opposing the thugs with any degree of effectiveness. On the Party's instructions, he joined in secret. He was strictly forbidden to join the Reichsbanner, the Social Democratic Party groups who fought the Nazi Brownshirts in the streets. You are too talented, he was told, too potentially valuable to the cause, to risk a knife in your ribs.

On 30 January 1933, Hitler came to power. On 27 February the Reichstag was set on fire, and a national outburst of orchestrated thuggery against communists and Jews followed. Lev, this time with Lisa, once again found himself avoiding broken glass and unruly gangs in narrow streets. On 22 September the Reich Chamber of Culture came into being and promptly set about banishing all 'non-Aryan' culture from German life. On 4 October the racial and political purity of all newspapers and their editors was assured by the passing of the Reich Press Law. On that day too, Ludwig Barth summoned Lev: 'I can no longer accept you as a student. Your background is non-Aryan; you associate with Lisa Rosen, a communist and a Jewess. You have been speaking out against the Brownshirts.'

'Is this you speaking, professor, or the University?'

'It doesn't matter; there is no prospect that the University will grant you a doctorate.'

Professor Barth's comments did no more than crystallize thoughts which were already in Lev's mind. German academic life was in free-fall, matching the descent into hell of the country outside. The universities were being Nazified, recalcitrant professors dismissed, some murdered.

That evening Willy knocked on the door of Lev's fourth-floor apartment. Lev let him in. Willy was in an excited state. 'Lev,' he said, 'you are about to be arrested. Why? For speaking out against the Brownshirts. It is the Party's decision that you must leave the country immediately.'

'And Lisa and yourself?'

'Our place is here,' Willy said, 'fighting the fascists, with what outcome who can say? But you are too valuable to lose. You must carry on the struggle for world communism abroad.' Willy gave him the name of a girl in Kiel. 'She will look after you. Now go, quickly.'

Within half an hour Lev was heaving a suitcase loaded with books and little else through dark streets. After an hour, a safe distance from his apartment, he climbed a fence and spent a freezing night on a park bench, listening to the sounds of the dark. Early in the morning he made his way to the railway station. He half expected arrest on arrival, but in fact caught a train to Kiel without incident. He half expected arrest at Kiel too, but again left the railway station unchallenged, and found his way to an address which turned out to be a taxi service. He stayed there for six weeks, never leaving the house, until it was judged safe to transport him across dark fields to Denmark. Once there, he presented himself at the Neils Bohr Institute in Copenhagen where, as it happened, Otto Frisch was looking for an assistant. He wanted to test his Aunt Lise Meitner's quirky idea that perhaps an isotope of a rare heavy element called uranium was an unstable thing, prone to spontaneous fission like an amoeba.

A few months after Petrosian's flight, a mentally unstable Nazi storm trooper by the name of Bernhard Rust became the Reich's Minister for Science, Education and Popular Culture.

Soon after that, another storm trooper was appointed Rector of Berlin University. He promptly instituted twenty-five courses in 'racial science'.

Physics became 'a tool of world Jewry for the destruction of modern science'. Einstein the Jew was 'an alien mountebank' whose prestige proved, if proof were needed, that Jewish world rule was imminent.

And while German cultural and scientific life continued to self-destruct, a great exodus of talent took place. Soon this immense flow would be turned back against the Reich, focussed on its destruction. Some of it was directed into radar, some went into codebreaking. But for Lev Petrosian, far away in the New Mexico desert, it was the Bomb.

'Klaus Fuchs?' Romella asked, her brow wrinkled.

Findhorn said, 'The atom spy.'

'What about the others?'

'Some of them ring bells too. I think Bondi became Chief Scientist at the UK Ministry of Defence some time after the war.'

'Not bad going for an enemy alien.'

Findhorn frowned. 'Gold rings a bell too. Yes, got it. Bondi, Gold and Hoyle came up with the steady-state theory of the Universe. I read that in Scientific American. Rosenblum I don't know. Do you think the contacts are significant?'

'I'm just the translator, remember?'

'So why have you stopped?' Findhorn asked.