His posture ramrod straight, as always, Geller strode into the back of the bakery. The liver spots on his balding pate looked particularly prominent in the low yellow light. Luca Cracco was forever putting dimmer and dimmer bulbs into the kitchen’s fixtures. Electricity, like all else during wartime, had grown increasingly dear.
“Ah, this is where you work your magic,” said Geller, the man who’d set today’s events in motion with the note wrapped in a one-dollar bill.
Cracco said nothing.
“In the months we’ve been working together,” the man continued, walking up to an oven and peering into the open door, “I don’t believe I’ve ever complimented you on your bread, Luca.”
“I know I bake good bread. I don’t need praise.”
Words are never arrogant if they’re true.
Geller continued, “The wife and I like it very much. She makes French toast sometimes. You know what French toast is?”
“Of course.”
Heinrich Kohl, standing nearby, however, didn’t. Cracco explained about the egg-infused bread dish. Then added firmly, “But you must make it with butter. Not lard. If all you have is lard, do not bother.”
Geller nodded to the crate. “Let me see.”
Kohl opened the lid. The men looked down at the canister attached to the oven. All three men were somber, as if they were looking at a body in a casket.
Cracco said, “Uranium. That small amount will do what you say?”
“Yes, yes. There is enough there to turn New York City into a smoldering crater.”
I would have expected bigger …
This material, Cracco had learned, would be turned into what was called an atomic bomb, and it seemed like something out of the science-fiction fumetti comic books that were so popular in Italy. Kohl had been working on it in Heidelberg for several years, seven days a week, ever since the directive from the führer was handed down to construct such a weapon.
Cracco patted his pockets and then stopped abruptly. “Is it, I mean, can I smoke?”
Kohl laughed. “Yes.”
He handed out Camels and the men lit up.
Cracco inhaled deeply.
Quarto …
At that moment another man appeared in the doorway of the bakery’s kitchen. A trim man, with a military bearing like Geller’s. He looked around, mystified.
“General,” said the new arrival respectfully. He was speaking to Geller, whom everyone referred to that way, though he was retired from his job as the U.S. army chief of staff in Washington. Presently he was a civilian—second in command of the Office of Strategic Services. Wild Bill Donovan’s right-hand man.
“Sir. I—”
“At ease, Tom. It’ll all get explained.” Geller then asked Kohl, “Do we need to do anything with it?” Nodding at the canister in the crate.
“No, no, it’s perfectly safe. Well, if you open the lead casing, you’d die of radiation poisoning in a day or two, and, I promise you, that would not be a pleasant way to die.”
“But it won’t blow up, will it?”
“No. The uranium must be shaped carefully and machined to within micromillimeters and the vectors arranged in such a way that critical mass—”
“Fine, fine,” Geller muttered. “Just need to know if our boys drop it, we don’t incinerate the Western Hemisphere.”
“Nein. That won’t happen.”
“Sir?” Brandon asked again.
“Okay. Here’s the scoop, Tom. Luca Cracco and Heinrich Kohl. This is Tom Brandon. Head of the OSS office here in New York. Even though we don’t technically have an office here in New York.”
Cracco had no idea what this meant.
Geller continued, “Colonel Kohl, of the Abwehr, formerly with the Abwehr, was a professor of physics at the university in Heidelberg before the war. He’s spent the last four years working with a team there to make one of these atomic bomb things. We knew Hitler wanted one, but we weren’t too worried. Everybody in Washington thought the crazy bastard’d shot himself in the foot with his Law for the Restoration of the Professional Civil Service. You know, the law that kicked all non-Aryan professors out of colleges in Germany. Including most of their top atomic physicists. Felix Bloch, Max Born, Albert Einstein, and—”
Kohl said with a wry grin, “Yes, yes, how ironic it was! Hitler lost the very men who could determine the precise measure of mass to turn uranium 235 into a fissile material. And that is—”
Geller cut him off before the professor/colonel got technical again. “And they fled to the West. But der Führer insisted the work go on—with people like Heinrich here. Of course, he happened to have a conscience, unlike some of his colleagues. His goal all along was to keep working on this … what do you call it again?”
“Fissile material.”
“Yeah, that. But smuggle it to us, through the underground.” Geller glanced at Cracco. “Enter our amateur spy, here. About two months ago, Luca’s brother, Vincenzo, a soldier with the Italian army, was captured by the Nazis and thrown in a POW camp.”