Anne put in quietly, “As of twelve hours ago, that is no longer any problem.”
She met Shayne’s look squarely. “You have to understand the situation, and that seems to be quite a large part of it. It wasn’t that much of a miracle, really. It happened the way such things are supposed to happen.”
“Don’t explain,” Little said gently. “I’m grateful to you, my dear. It was enjoyable, as well as surprising. That doesn’t mean I intend to drape myself about your neck like an albatross the rest of my life. It was the sort of incident that takes place on ocean liners, and it demonstrated to me that I might look forward to other such incidents with other people, if this luck stays with me. You have a strong grip on life. That is what turned me around, not the love making.”
He looked back at Shayne. “I have felt myself caught in a spiral, you see, and this has broken the spiral. Why do I need to go on living with my wife? I don’t. I have no real obligation to assume the debts of my father-in-law and my brother-in-law. I can get out of weapons work. It has all turned out to be easy. Anne has wrenched me through a forty-five-degree arc, and now I see myself from a different angle. Not that my problems are over, they’re beginning.”
“Let’s get back to Dessau. When did that start?”
“In the spring. At first we only saw him over the weekends — he came down from London. He described himself as a commission man who could procure anything — pornographic film, drugs, girls, boys. Not a bad sort to have a drink with. There are always four or five chaps from the Facility at the Three Heads, and Pierre cultivated us, rather. We tabbed him as one of those romantics who have seen too many James Bond films, who imagine if they can get to be pals with a genuine real-life atomic physicist he will let slip some secret tidbit they can sell to the Russians. It’s all a great joke. He plied us with drinks, hinting at the availability of other delights. He actually did introduce one of the chaps to a girl who didn’t turn out to be so bad. It wasn’t secret intelligence he was after, it developed. It was the actual bomb.”
“How did you find that out?”
“I put myself in his hands.”
Little looked into the bowl of his dead pipe. The lines around his mouth had deepened.
“I had undergone a — humiliation, of the personal type we have been discussing, and this one seemed final to me. I heard my sixteen-year-old son talking about me to a friend, in unflattering terms. Unflattering, my eye — abusive. I was passed over by the Academy of Sciences. I decided there was no use in continuing. It was a Saturday night. I stupefied myself with gin and hooked a rubber hose to the exhaust of my Humber. Pierre had followed me home and observed these preparations.”
He stood up and started to move about the cabin. His tone became more agitated.
“He waited till I got into the car and turned on the engine, and then tore open the door and dragged me out. We had more to drink, a great deal more, and at last he broached his fantastic proposal. He had no objection to suicide per se. Every man, he believed, should be allowed to make that decision for himself. But to do it in such a silly way, with carbon monoxide. Why not arrange the thing so as to make a point? He wanted to know exactly what was bothering me, and I told him — money, the scorn of my children, sex — the lot. He could promise me nothing about sex, but he promised money; he promised to show me a way to redeem myself politically and morally in my children’s eyes, and how to pull a thundering swindle on the United States Treasury. Because I found life meaningless, did death have to be meaningless? He was offering a way to break into history.”
“Was this off the top of his head,” Shayne said, “or did he seem to know what he was talking about?”
Little was puzzled. “I think he had carried that cutting around a long time.”
“He doesn’t have a chance in hell of collecting the reward. Does he realize that? It could make a difference.”
Little stared at him. He took off his glasses and began polishing them on his shirttail. Without the glasses, he looked younger and more helpless.
“You don’t believe in the reward.”
“That’s not what I’m saying. Congress may have passed Such an act and maybe it’s still on the books. That doesn’t mean payment is automatic. No government gives away half a million dollars to a noncitizen, with no political muscle, unless it has to. He’ll have to sue. All kinds of loopholes are going to turn up. If there’s any hint of collusion — it wouldn’t have to be proved; all I’d have to do is go in and testify to what you’ve just told me — he wouldn’t collect a cent. With lots of luck, he might end up in a couple of years with twenty-five thousand. Fifty would be tops.”
“Shayne, you understand this thing has been an obsession with him. He researched it thoroughly. He’s positive the reward has never been withdrawn — it’s still the law of the land. I was under the impression that paying informers in smuggling cases is common practice.”
“A judge can award an informer as much as fifty percent of any smuggling fine,” Shayne explained. “He can. That doesn’t mean he has to. If they hope to use the same informer again, they’ll want to keep him happy. But this is a one-shot. It’s always hard to collect any one-shot reward. That’s a well-known fact of life, and what I want to find out is whether you think he knows it.”
“I’m sure he doesn’t! Can you seriously maintain that the Congress of the United States can post a half-million-dollar reward, and only pay twenty-five thousand?”
“Hardly seems fair, does it?”
Little fitted his face into his glasses. “Pierre will be very, very disillusioned with American democracy if that proves to be true. In fantasy, I’m quite sure he has invested the entire half million in consoles and conservative bank stocks, and is financially secure for life. As for collusion — of course he didn’t anticipate that I would give the scheme away to a stranger, a private detective, whose testimony would be accepted by a jury. He was planning the story along the following lines: he overheard me making anti-American statements, which were more than a little odd, coming from a man in my position. I said something about what a political success it would be to blow up Capitol Hill. He inquired about my off-job activities. I had purchased an expensive second-hand motorcar. It was in excellent running condition, but nonetheless, he noticed, I was doing some mysterious tinkering on it in my garage workshop very late at night. When I accepted an American job and decided to go by boat, taking my tinkered-with Bentley, everything coalesced. He flew to Miami and alerted the authorities. ‘Look closely at this Left-wing scientist. Examine his car.’ I thought myself it was an excellent plan.”
“How powerful a bomb is it?”
“You dignify it by calling it a bomb. Plutonium in the usual form of tiny metallic balls, plus a crude triggering device with a three-switch arming mechanism. You couldn’t explode it by dropping it from an airplane, but use an ordinary fulminating cap and you might get a rather impressive bang. Ridiculously low yield. Stated in commonly understood terms, it would have a force of twenty kilotons, twenty thousand tons of TNT. And of course very dirty — radioactivity would be a continuing problem. You understand that the object is not actually to blow up anything, but to frighten people.”
“How did you get it out of the laboratory?”
Little shrugged. “I happened to be in charge of security. At one time we were very meticulous, but as the decades have passed with nothing out of the way happening, we have become lax. The inventory figures on fissionable material can be played with. There is a battery of counters at each exit. One of my routine duties has been to check daily to make sure each counter is operational. You know the principle of the Geiger counter — a simple electrode in a cylinder filled with gas, which will set up a current in an electric field when ionized by radiation. An electrical source is necessary. I simply interrupted the circuits at one of the lesser-used exits. For years and years those counters have never clicked except when being tested. They didn’t click when I walked past with the vials of plutonium in my raincoat pockets.”