“I will think about it.”
“Don’t bother. You’ve got more important things to think about, like those problems we reviewed the last time I was there with you.”
“That is what I have been doing.”
“And? Have you figured out what we’re doing wrong?”
“The mathematics were precise, even elegant, but I do think that I have found the underlying flaw.”
“In the math?” Oppenheimer asked, surprised.
“No, you cannot beat John von Neumann at that game. The flaw is in the application. The mechanics.”
“Don’t tell me anything more over this phone. Write it all down, and I’ll send a courier. When do you want him?”
“Allow me the night to compose my conclusions. Send him tomorrow morning, late.”
“Okay then. Say good-bye to your cronies, Albert. I’ve already sent cars to round them up — I’ll make sure Russell gets wherever he wants to go, too.”
“But he is my houseguest.”
“Not anymore, he isn’t. What if your crazy theory is right and somebody wants to kill the apostle of peace and harmony, after all? There’s a war on — get back to work.”
Oppenheimer hung up, as usual, without saying good-bye, and Einstein sat back in his chair. Through the window, he could see a tabby cat lurking near the garage, stalking something in the backyard. He’d seen this cat out there before, and though he knew that cats, too, had to eat, he hoped that its quarry would escape unharmed. If only there were a way, he thought, that every living creature could survive without doing injury to any other. The world had been constructed along bloody lines, of that there was no doubt, and it remained a puzzle at least as baffling as the unified field theory he had been seeking so long.
Outside, he could hear the slamming of car doors, followed by the tromping of feet on the wooden steps of the front porch. Then voices, several of them — young, male, and peremptory. The security detail sent by Oppenheimer to safely escort everyone away. The man was a strict taskmaster, but then he had to be. A war, indeed, was on — the worst that the world had ever known. Einstein turned his attention to the blackboard on which he had been scrawling his latest calculations, and wondered again if he was serving mankind as an angel, or a devil. Would his work here bring an end to the war, or simply sow the whirlwind? It was something he could have discussed with Russell, a man as tormented by such questions as he was, for hours on end.
But not, it would seem, tonight. Tonight there would be no vigorous debate, no company at all, in fact.
Turning his attention to the blackboard, in only a few moments he had done what he had always been able to do, whether it was in a quiet study in Bern or on a crowded trolley car in Berlin — he had lost himself in his true home: the beautiful, and infinitely consoling, realm of thought alone.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Even though Simone had wanted — begged — to accompany Lucas to the hospital, he had persuaded her to stay with her father, who looked, quite understandably, very troubled and shocked by the incident at the stadium.
The emergency room was in commotion, too, and Lucas wondered if this was common on a Saturday evening. Doctors and nurses were bustling about, speaking in low tones and appearing distracted. It was several minutes before a harried intern was found who could attend to Lucas’s knife wound. After swabbing it with antiseptic and taking a cursory look, he declared it a superficial wound, but put in a half-dozen stitches for good measure.
As the intern gathered up his supplies, he happened to ask Lucas how he’d been cut, and when Lucas told him he’d been attacked by a guy with a knife—“a guy named Wally Gregg, who’s been a patient in this hospital”—the intern abruptly stopped and said, “Can you wait here for a minute?”
Lucas had barely finished buttoning his bloodstained shirt when a portly man in a blue uniform barged in. A brass badge pinned to his lapel identified him as T.J. Farrell, Borough Police Chief.
“Is what that intern just told me true?”
“I couldn’t have made it up. What’s going on?”
“A doctor was injured downstairs a couple of hours ago. He was working in the morgue.”
“Was his name Crowley, by any chance?”
“Jesus Christ,” Farrell said. “How’d you know that, too?”
“I know he was attending to Wally Gregg.”
“Grab your stuff,” he said, gesturing at Lucas’s torn jacket draped on the examining table, “and come with me. Now.”
Leading him down a corridor, Farrell threw open the door to a private room where Lucas found Dr. Crowley propped up in a bed, with a bandage around his head, an IV drip hooked up to his arm, and a dreamy sedated look in his eye.
“I gather you two don’t need any introductions,” Farrell said.
Crowley didn’t reply, but lifted a hand limply off the bed to indicate that it was true.
“Mr. Lucas here says that he was attacked, too — and by the same guy that attacked you.”
A dim but fearful light went on in Crowley’s eyes.
“Tell him what happened in the morgue, Doc.”
Crowley looked uncertain, as if he wasn’t sure he could or even should tell this particular story.
“Tell him already. I haven’t got all day.”
“He died,” the doctor croaked from the bed.
“You mean the patient, right?” Farrell said, in a tone indicating that he was merely prompting the doctor for Lucas’s benefit.
“Yes. Gregg. Wally Gregg died.”
“From the infection,” Farrell prompted him again. “The bat bites, right?”
Crowley nodded, but just barely. “I pronounced him dead myself,” he said, his words slurred by the drugs. “He had no heartbeat. No pulse. No brain activity. He was dead.”
“And then what?” Farrell said. “Go on — tell him.”
“We took him downstairs for the autopsy. I was filling out the certificate. The death certificate.” Crowley closed his eyes for a few seconds before continuing. “That’s when I heard a noise, and I turned around.” He stopped again, as if unable to believe what he was recounting. “He was sitting up. His eyes were open.”
“And then what?” the chief said.
“He picked up the metal block — the one we wedge under the knees during an autopsy — and he hit me with it.” His hand went up toward his bandaged head. “He hit me with it, over and over again. He knocked me out.”
Lucas could hardly fathom what he was hearing. The last time he’d seen Wally in the hospital, the poor man looked like he was only inches from death’s door. How could he have recovered enough to knock someone out, much less leave the hospital, arm himself, and travel all the way to the stadium?
“When Doc Crowley here came to,” Farrell said to Lucas, “he was missing most of his clothes — his pants, his shoes, his coat and hat — and we have since learned that one of the surgical knives is gone. You think that’s what he used to wound you?”
“I didn’t get a good look at it.”
“We’ll get it later. Anything you can add to this?”
Lucas wondered how much he should share. “He looked like he was in a trance of some kind,” he said, “and he seemed to be heading straight for Professor Einstein.”
“Dr. Einstein was at the game?” Plainly, this part of the story was news to the police chief, and very unwelcome news at that.
“Yes. Even when I knocked Wally down and started fighting with him, he was still so focused on getting to his target that I don’t think he actually saw me.”