Once the table was cleared, and Amy had gone upstairs to finish her homework, Lucas stepped out onto the porch and lit up a Camel. The limousine that had been parked across the street was gone, but the quaint, white two-story house, set back behind a neat front yard, was brightly lit, and through an open window, Lucas could hear the strains of a string quartet. For a second, he thought it was a phonograph, but then he stepped down the stairs to the sidewalk and realized that the music was actually being rehearsed in the front parlor. In a college town like Princeton, it wasn’t so unexpected. He heard laughter and the clinking of glasses. Someone scratched some deliberately grating notes on a cello. An elderly man’s voice, with a German accent, said something about starting again, and all in the same key this time.
More laughter. But the accent had been jarring.
He listened to the music — Mozart, if he wasn’t mistaken — and thought, despite himself, of the old mayor asking him not to harm the villagers hiding in the shaft. But he wasn’t the one who had planted the land mine that blew the child to kingdom come, left Toussaint with only one leg, and him with only one eye. When his cigarette was down to the filter, he stubbed it out on the sidewalk, and went back inside the boardinghouse. Mrs. Caputo was humming in the kitchen as she finished washing the dishes.
“Can I help you with those?”
“Oh, no,” she said over her shoulder. “I’m almost done.”
“So you’ve got a string quartet living across the street now?”
“Pardon?” she said, turning off the water and drying her hands on a dishrag.
“Across the street, I heard music. Are they musicians?”
“Oh, gosh, no,” she said. “That’s the professor. I guess he moved in after you’d joined up.”
“What professor?”
“Einstein.”
Lucas was nonplussed. Like everyone, he knew that Albert Einstein, fleeing from the Nazis, had emigrated from Berlin to Princeton in 1933 to take a professorship in theoretical physics. Lucas had even seen him on campus a few times. But he hadn’t been living across from the Caputos on Mercer Street back then.
“He’s a very sweet man,” she said. “He saw Amy carrying her violin case home from school, and they had a very nice chat about music.”
So that had been Einstein’s voice, merrily conducting the musicians. And that was why the long black limousine had been parked outside. Lucas wondered what dignitary or government official might have been paying the great man a visit.
“Sometimes, in the summer, I just sit on the front porch and listen. When Tony comes home,” she said, with a note of forced conviction in her voice, “he’s going to love it.”
“Yes, he will,” Lucas readily assented.
They both knew that they had just offered up an unspoken prayer.
“Good night then,” Lucas said, turning toward the stairs. “And thanks for the icebox cake.”
“Sleep as late as you want. It’s Labor Day weekend.”
In his room upstairs, the air was warm and close, and he threw the window open all the way. Leaning his head out, he could still hear the strains of the string quartet. Wait ’til he told his family, he thought. They’d been impressed enough when he first got the job at Princeton — what would they do when they found out that Einstein, one of the most celebrated people in the whole world, was his neighbor?
CHAPTER THREE
She knew that she was not supposed to be up on deck, much less in such high seas, but the air below was so fetid she couldn’t stand it anymore.
The USS Seward, with an enormous Red Cross insignia painted on its bulwarks and an additional sign displayed on its main deck for the benefit of any Luftwaffe pilots that might be passing overhead, was packed with wounded American soldiers. The Geneva Conventions barred attacks on Red Cross ships, but there was no telling which prohibitions would be observed and when. As a result, the ship was being escorted by a pair of navy destroyers. The North Atlantic was teeming with U-boats — the wolf pack, they were called — that had already sunk well over a hundred British and American vessels. Even now, one of their conning towers might be surveying this flotilla churning toward New York Harbor, and a German captain might be ordering his crew to load the torpedo bays.
Simone Rashid, swaddled in a rain slicker with the hood drawn over her hair, clutched the railing and stared out at the heaving gray waves. This whole idea — rules of war — was absurd, she thought. Men went about killing each other in the most ingenious ways they could imagine, and on a scale never before seen, but at the same time, they insisted on making up rules of engagement to preserve a facade of civilization and morality. They were like children playing a game, but one with horrendous consequences. Growing up in Cairo, she remembered her brother forming a secret club with a bunch of his friends from the King Fuad English-Speaking School, and they, too, had a long list of bylaws, rules, and regulations. The one that had rankled the most was the first one, which barred girls from joining the club. Her whole life had been a struggle against that prohibition. At the preparatory school, then Oxford, then the Egyptian Department of Cultural Affairs, she’d had to fight to prove her qualifications, to gain entry, and then, despite her exemplary scholarship, to be taken seriously.
Her youth didn’t help — she was twenty-seven, but looked even younger — nor did her beauty. Her mother had been the high-spirited, rebellious daughter of an English diplomat, and as well known for her raven tresses as she was for her scandalous behavior. Simone had inherited her looks and her temperament, along with the olive skin and dark brown eyes of her Arab father. She had taken to wearing muted colors and loose-fitting clothes to minimize the effect of her looks, but most men, she had discovered, saw through the camouflage and kept right on coming.
“You’re not authorized to be on deck, Miss,” she heard behind her, the voice nearly obliterated by the gusting wind.
She turned to see a young sailor in a green slicker reeling in a coil of wet rope. “It’s not safe,” he said.
She patted the life preserver she had strapped over her slicker to indicate she had heard, but he just shook his head. “They wouldn’t even know you’d gone overboard until it was too late.” Then, moving closer so as not to be overheard, he added, “And they probably wouldn’t turn around even if they did.”
Simone had to laugh. She knew he was right. Nothing was going to delay the progress of the Seward and its cargo of war casualties, on their way to safe haven in the United States. One young female scholar and her aged Arab father, both of whom were considered mysteries to the officers and crew, would never be of much importance. At best, they were tolerated; at worst, they were mistrusted.
An ensign, passing by, looked at her askance, then glared at the sailor. “Civilians should be belowdecks,” he barked.
The sailor kept his head down and pretended to be absorbed in stowing the rope.
“I’ve already been warned,” Simone assured him, “and I am quite capable of not falling overboard.” Her English carried the upper-crust accent of her late mother, only slightly tinged by an Arabic inflection. But this time her answer wasn’t good enough.
The ensign, feet planted wide to keep his balance on the roiling deck, said, “That’s an order from the bridge. Go below, now!”
Simone’s back went up; she didn’t like taking orders. “Why?” she said, her retort undercut by a sudden rolling of the boat that forced her to grab the railing with both hands.
The ensign smirked. “We’ve detected enemy activity, that’s why.”
Conceding defeat — reluctantly — she moved toward the hatchway, clutching the slick railing hand over hand. She could not afford to create any kind of ruckus; her very presence on the boat, like her father’s, was based on a deception. The official letters and work visas that had gotten them on board had been dummied up in her office at the Egyptian ministry. Calling any undue attention to herself could prove dangerous.