Winter of the World

Carla and Ada turned a corner, and relief washed over Carla like a tidal wave. She had got rid of the corpse. If only she could get home without attracting further attention – and without anyone looking inside the wardrobe and seeing the bloody towel – she would be safe. There would be no murder investigation. Joachim had become a pedestrian killed in a blackout accident. If he had really been dragged along the cobbled street by the wheels of the truck, he might have received injuries similar to those caused by the heavy base of Ada’s soup pot. Perhaps a skilled autopsy doctor could tell the difference – but no one would consider an autopsy necessary.

Carla thought about dumping the wardrobe, and decided against it. Even without the towel it had bloodstains inside, and might spark a police investigation on its own. They had to take it home and scrub it clean.

They got home without meeting anyone else.

They put the wardrobe down in the hall. Ada took out the towel, put it in the kitchen sink, and ran the cold tap. Carla felt a mixture of elation and sadness. She had stolen the Nazis’ battle plan, but she had killed a young man who was more foolish than wicked. She would think about that for many days, perhaps years, before she could be sure how she felt about it. For now she was just too tired.

She told her mother what they had done. Maud’s left cheek was so puffed up that her eye was almost closed. She was pressing her left side as if to ease a pain. She looked terrible.

Carla said: ‘You were terribly brave, Mother. I admire you so much for what you did today.’

Maud said wearily: ‘I don’t feel admirable. I’m so ashamed. I despise myself.’

‘Because you didn’t love him?’ said Carla.

‘No,’ said Maud. ‘Because I did.’

14

1942 (III)

Greg Peshkov graduated from Harvard summa cum laude, the highest honour. He could have gone on effortlessly to take a doctorate in physics, his major, and thus have avoided military service. But he did not want to be a scientist. His ambition was to wield a different kind of power. And, after the war was over, a military record would be a huge plus for a rising young politician. So he joined the army.

On the other hand, he did not want actually to have to fight.

He followed the European war with heightened interest at the same time as he pressured everyone he knew in Washington – which was a lot of people – to get him a desk job at War Department headquarters.

The German summer offensive had started on 28 June, and they had swiftly pushed east, meeting relatively light opposition, until they reached the city of Stalingrad, formerly called Tsaritsyn, where they were halted by fierce Russian resistance. Now they were stalled, with overstretched supply lines, and it was looking more and more as if the Red Army had drawn them into a trap.

Greg had not long been in basic training when he was summoned to the colonel’s office. ‘The Army Corps of Engineers needs a bright young officer in Washington,’ the colonel said. ‘You’ve interned in Washington, but all the same you wouldn’t have been my first choice – you can’t even keep your goddamn uniform clean, look at you – but the job requires a knowledge of physics, and the field is kind of limited.’

Greg said: ‘Thank you, sir.’

‘Try that kind of sarcasm on your new boss and you’ll regret it. You’re going to be an assistant to a Colonel Groves. I was at West Point with him. He’s the biggest son of a bitch I ever met, in the army or out. Good luck.’

Greg called Mike Penfold in the State Department press office and found out that until recently Leslie Groves had been chief of construction for the entire US Army, and had been responsible for the military’s new Washington headquarters, the vast five-sided building they were beginning to call the Pentagon. But he had been moved to a new project that no one knew much about. Some said he had offended his superiors so often that he had been effectively demoted; others that his new role was even more important but top secret. They all agreed he was egotistical, arrogant and ruthless.

‘Does everybody hate him?’ Greg asked.

‘Oh, no,’ Mike said. ‘Only those who have met him.’

Lieutenant Greg Peshkov was full of trepidation when he arrived at Groves’s office in the striking New War Department Building, a pale-tan art deco palace on 21st Street and Virginia Avenue. Right away he learned that he was part of a group called the Manhattan Engineer District. This deliberately uninformative name camouflaged a team who were trying to invent a new kind of bomb using uranium as an explosive.

Greg was intrigued. He knew there was incalculable energy locked up in uranium’s lighter isotope, U-235, and he had read several papers on the subject in scientific journals. But news of the research had dried up a couple of years ago, and now Greg knew why.

He learned that President Roosevelt felt the project was moving too slowly, and Groves had been appointed to crack the whip.