Lucas felt a hand gripping his shoulder, and registered Taylor saying, “You can let go now. You can let go.”
The gleam in the man’s eye winked out.
Lucas was dimly aware of ushers shepherding Einstein and the others in his party up the aisle. Gödel, hardly able to walk from the fear, was being supported on either side by Russell and Szilárd.
“It’s okay to let go,” Taylor said, trying to calm him.
Lucas leaned back on his haunches, trying to catch his breath again, his heart still pounding. Taylor had his hand under his arm now, and was helping to raise him up and then deposit him on one of the vacated seats.
Lucas was still trying to make some sense out of what he was seeing.
Lying at his feet, his coat torn open in the struggle, wearing a soiled hospital gown tucked into a pair of suit trousers, was the janitor from the art museum. Wally Gregg.
Simone was suddenly beside him, her hand on the lapel of his jacket. “Are you all right?” she said, her father leaning anxiously on his cane behind her. She plucked at his punctured sleeve and said, “You’ve been cut.”
But Lucas still didn’t feel it; the adrenaline coursing through his veins was keeping any pain at bay. All he could focus on was the body sprawled in the aisle. The body of a man who had already been through hell, a man everyone had expected to die in the hospital bed where Lucas had left him.
Only he hadn’t. He had died here, and at Lucas’s hand.
Ushers, and then a pair of cops, cleared the other onlookers away. The announcer declared over the PA system that, although there was no reason for panic, everyone should leave the stadium immediately, in an orderly fashion.
“We have to get you to a hospital,” Simone said.
Taylor agreed—“and get him a tetanus shot, he got cut with that knife”—as several more cops showed up to cordon off the area. Lucas felt Simone’s arm wrap around him as he moved up the aisle toward the exit.
“He said something,” Lucas said. The crowd, agitated, jostled them on all sides. He was starting to feel some sensation in his upper arm, and something warm — blood — trickling down below his torn sleeve.
“I didn’t hear it,” Simone said.
“I wonder what it was.”
“I heard it,” Dr. Rashid confessed as they passed into the gloomy shadow of the archway.
“You did?” Lucas said, lifting his injured arm to his chest in an attempt to shield it from the throng surging around them. “What was it?”
“It was Arabic.”
That sounded about right, though he still had no idea what the words meant, or how Wally Gregg of all people would have come to shout them.
“Ancient Arabic, in fact.”
The pain in his arm came alive, as abruptly as if a switch had just been thrown. Wincing, Lucas said, “Meaning?”
With an ashen expression on his face, Dr. Rashid carefully planted his cane on the next step, then answered, “It was an oath. A common one in that region of the world.”
The PA system blared some unintelligible instruction.
“It means, ‘Death to the swine.’ ”
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
Professor Einstein and his friends were whisked out of the stadium by policemen, loaded into a cruiser, and driven straight back to Mercer Street, sirens blaring and lights flashing. Helen was already waiting on the front porch by the time they got there, and quickly brought them all inside, closing and locking both the screen door, which was usually left open, and the inner door, too. A cop, arms folded, was stationed on the front steps.
Russell, Szilárd, and Gödel were all as agitated as could be expected, though Einstein himself felt an odd sense of calm. The incident, after all, was over, with no serious repercussions — unless that young man, the one with the black patch, had been seriously hurt. He would have to make inquiries about his welfare.
While Helen fussed over the others, offering tea and brandy and wrapping a blanket around the shivering Gödel’s shoulders, Einstein himself went up to his office to gather his thoughts. He shrugged off his coat and was just about to toss it on the sofa when he noticed what looked like blood spattered on the collar. He knew it wasn’t his own, and now he was even more concerned about the fate of that young man with the eye patch. Something told him that he had even seen the fellow before, and then he remembered — he had observed him once or twice on the porch of that house across the street. Ah then, that would make it easier to find out if he was all right.
Brushing some papers from the seat of his desk chair — Helen sometimes piled his mail there so he wouldn’t miss it — he plopped down and let out a great sigh. In a way, he was surprised that this sort of thing hadn’t happened to him more often. Every day, he received a flood of fan mail from people in all walks of life — budding scientists, schoolchildren, even the occasional female admirer — but mixed in with all the pleasant stuff were angry letters from cranks, maniacs, conspiracy theorists, anti-Semites, and proud and patriotic Americans who believed he was a Communist sympathizer or worse. J. Edgar Hoover, Einstein knew perfectly well, suspected him of harboring pro-Soviet sentiments and, as a result, had undoubtedly been keeping a file on him at the FBI for many years. It was Hoover, without question, who had been instrumental in revoking the top security clearance that Einstein had once enjoyed.
And which Oppenheimer had secretly circumvented by coming to his house for help.
When the phone rang only minutes later, he wasn’t surprised. He waited for Helen to answer it downstairs, as she always did, then listened for her knock on his door. When it came, he said, “Yes?”
“It is from New Mexico, Professor.”
He didn’t have to know any more than that. He swiveled his creaking chair toward the desk, cleared away some paper debris, and picked up the receiver. He had barely said hello before Oppenheimer blurted out, “Are you all right?”
“Yes, Robert, I am fine.”
“I’m told the assassin is dead.”
He was? Einstein had not known that for sure. “But he cannot have been an assassin, can he, if I am still here and on the telephone?” At the worst and most trying moments, it was his habit always to try to find a joke. “That is only logical, ja?”
“You’re spending too much time with Gödel.”
Einstein managed a dry chuckle. “Leó and Bertrand are keeping him company right now, in the parlor.”
“Is that Bertrand as in Russell?”
“Yes.” Einstein could virtually hear Oppenheimer taking in this one small detail he might not have known.
“Huh. I was told there was someone else in your party. They didn’t tell me it was Mr. Pacifism and Appeasement himself.”
“He has come around in his opinions, you know. In light of what is happening in the world today, his views, like mine, have had to change.”
“Well, that’s a relief.”
“Have you considered that the attacker might have been after him, and not me? The knife fell right between us.” Even with the static on the long-distance line, Einstein could hear Oppenheimer snort.
“Nobody wants to kill a philosopher, Albert. Nobody cares.”
“And they care about physicists? To most people, I am just an old man long ago put away in mothballs.”
“Not to that guy with the knife you weren’t. Whoever he turns out to be, he knew better than that. That’s what worries me. Will you listen to me now, when I say that you need a bodyguard? I still have friends in Army Intelligence who will okay it if I say so. Hoover will never even know.”