Winter of the World

The FBI had found out in advance that McHugh was coming to the concert, and Special Agent Bicks had managed to get Greg two seats a few rows behind McHugh’s. A concert hall, with hundreds of strangers crowding together to come in and go out, was the perfect location for a clandestine rendezvous, and Greg wanted to know what McHugh might be up to.

It was a pity they had met before. Greg had talked to McHugh in Chicago on the day the nuclear pile was tested. It had been a year and a half ago, but McHugh might remember. So Greg had to make sure McHugh did not see him.

When Greg and Margaret arrived, McHugh’s seats were empty. Either side were two ordinary-looking couples, a middle-aged man in a cheap grey chalk-stripe suit and his dowdy wife on the left, and two elderly ladies on the right. Greg hoped McHugh was going to show up. If the guy was a spy Greg wanted to nail him.

They were going to hear Tchaikovsky’s first symphony. ‘So, you like classical music,’ said Margaret chattily as the orchestra tuned up. She had no idea of the real reason she had been brought here. She knew that Greg was working in weapons research, which was secret, but like almost all Americans she had no inkling of the nuclear bomb. ‘I thought you only listened to jazz,’ she said.

‘I love Russian composers – they’re so dramatic,’ Greg told her. ‘I expect it’s in my blood.’

‘I was raised listening to classical. My father likes to have a small orchestra at dinner parties.’ Margaret’s family were rich enough to make Greg feel a pauper by comparison. But he still had not met her parents, and he suspected they would disapprove of the illegitimate son of a famous Hollywood womanizer. ‘What are you looking at?’ she said.

‘Nothing.’ The McHughs had arrived. ‘What’s your perfume?’

‘Chichi by Renoir.’

‘I love it.’

The McHughs looked happy, a bright and prosperous young couple on holiday. Greg wondered if they were late because they had been making love in their hotel room.

Barney McHugh sat next to the man in the grey chalk stripe. Greg knew it was a cheap suit by the unnatural stiffness of the padded shoulders. The man did not look at the newcomers. The McHughs started to do a crossword, their heads leaning together intimately as they studied the newspaper Barney was holding. A few minutes later the conductor appeared.

The opening piece was by Saint-Saëns. German and Austrian composers had declined in popularity since war broke out, and concertgoers were discovering alternatives. There was a revival of Sibelius.

McHugh was probably a Communist. Greg knew this because J. Robert Oppenheimer had told him. Oppenheimer, a leading theoretical physicist from the University of California, was director of the Los Alamos laboratory and scientific leader of the entire Manhattan Project. He had strong Communist ties, though he insisted he had never joined the party.

Special Agent Bicks had said to Greg: ‘Why does the army have to have all these pinkos? Whatever it is you’re trying to achieve out there in the desert, aren’t there enough bright young conservative scientists in America to do it?’

‘No, there aren’t,’ Greg had told him. ‘If there were, we would have hired them.’

Communists were sometimes more loyal to their cause than to their country, and might think it right to share the secrets of nuclear research with the Soviet Union. This would not be like giving information to the enemy. The Soviets were America’s allies against the Nazis – in fact, they had done more of the fighting than all the other allies put together. All the same it was dangerous. Information intended for Moscow might find its way to Berlin. And anyone who thought about the postwar world for more than a minute could guess that the USA and the USSR might not always be friends.

The FBI thought Oppenheimer was a security risk and kept trying to persuade Greg’s boss, General Groves, to fire him. But Oppenheimer was the outstanding scientist of his generation, so the General insisted on keeping him.

In an attempt to prove his loyalty, Oppenheimer had named McHugh as a possible Communist, and that was why Greg was tailing him.

The FBI were sceptical. ‘Oppenheimer is blowing smoke up your ass,’ Bicks had said.

Greg said: ‘I can’t believe it. I’ve known him for a year now.’

‘He’s a fucking Communist, like his wife and his brother and his sister-in-law.’

‘He’s working nineteen hours a day to build better weapons for American soldiers – what kind of traitor does that?’

Greg hoped McHugh did turn out to be a spy, for that would lift suspicion from Oppenheimer, bolster General Groves’s credibility, and boost Greg’s own status too.