Robert Butler - The Empire of Night

He was rising to his feet to greet me, a trim, medium-sized man with upstanding, dense, faintly wavy black hair and an equally dense mustache that neatly shrouded his entire upper lip from laugh line to laugh line. His chin was deeply cleft and his eyes were nearly as dark as his hair but they came brightly alive as he rose.

“This is Doctor Albert Einstein,” Mother said.

He offered his hand with my name on his lips even before she could formally announce it. “Mr. Hunter. I am very pleased to meet you.” He spoke in English that was proper but German-accented as heavily as if by a ham actor.

I thought I saw his eyes flick toward my saber scar. But if so, it was so quick I could not say for sure.

Mother said, “I told the professor that you’re working on a story about the Kaiser Wilhelm Institute and you need to speak with him.”

“I am pleased to assist you from the urging of Madam Cobb,” Einstein said. “She is pressing boldly outward our boundary of understanding. She tries to do for the immense William Shakespeare what a great physicist tries to do for the physical universe. So I comply with anything she asks.”

He laughed that high, ringing laugh.

Mother laughed with him. Not the bray. His overriding laugh made hers harder to read, but I looked at her and her eyes were locked on him in appreciation.

“The story is narrower than the Institute,” I said in German. “And I ask only to more deeply understand what I already know. You and your words will not appear in any newspaper. I ask for something perhaps like one scientist objectively testing another’s work.”

He brightened at my analogy, at my understanding of the process of scientific discovery. He laughed again. “A peer review,” he said.

“Forgive us for speaking German, Madam Cobb,” I said.

“Not at all,” she said. “I want you two to communicate fully.”

“As shall you and I,” Einstein said, in English, turning to her. “Over some little food.”

“Yes, Professor,” she said. “I look forward to learning from you.” And to me: “When you and the professor have finished, he and I will dine nearby.”

Perhaps I showed a glint of concern in my face.

She said, “You will recall that our previously intended companion tonight is dining at the Ministry.”

“I do recall that,” I said.

She rose. “I’ll leave the two of you alone so you can speak German without regret.”

“You need not go, dear lady,” Einstein said.

“I have to consult for a time with my director. I won’t go far.”

Einstein took up her hand and bowed over it and kissed it.

Mother shot me a look as if she blamed me for not regularly doing this myself.

As her physicist rose from her hand, he said, quite ardently, “ Soll ich dich einem Sommertag vergleichen ?”

And she shot me another look, this one approximately You see how they adore me? This look seemed unrelated to any apparent understanding of the words, though she was certainly correct about its intent.

She swooped from the room and the door clicked shut.

I said to Einstein, returning to German, as he’d just used with her, “You only asked to compare her. Are you saving the comparison itself?”

He laughed.

He had quoted Shakespeare’s sonnet to her. Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

“I am afraid,” he said, “that I cannot remember the comparison. Only the request.”

“Thou art more lovely and more temperate,” I said. Er ist wie du so lieblich nicht und lind.

“I am indebted to you,” Einstein said. “I shall finish the verse over dinner. Do you think she will understand?”

“She’ll understand, all right,” I said. “If not the words, certainly the intent.”

He beamed and I smiled in return. I managed only a wan smile, however, as I felt once again, inevitably, inextricably — perhaps even cosmologically — drawn into my mother’s flirtations and wooings and beyond.

Though I expected this Albert’s intent was no more than courtly flirtation.

Einstein and I sat down on the two chairs before Isabel Cobb’s makeup mirrors.

“May I?” he said, lifting his pipe.

“Of course,” I said.

He drew out a box of matches from the side pocket of his tweed jacket, and as he did, he glanced at me. Brief though it was, I was certain this time that the glance had sought out my scar.

I knew Einstein had once abandoned Germany. I said, “My father exiled our family from this country, but he sent me back to Heidelberg for an education. When I was young and stupid,” I said.

He smiled. “That is the state in which we all enter university,” he said.

He tamped his tobacco with his thumb and lit the bowl and drew at it and lit again and finally was producing sufficient smoke for me to speak.

I knew he’d exiled himself, and I knew his politics. I tapped into them at once. I said, “I am writing for a syndicate of newspapers in the United States. These are newspapers whose readers are largely German-Americans. The gentleman Madam Cobb and I just referred to is an English baron with deep roots in Germany. Very deep roots. He feels the German cause is misunderstood in my country. He feels Germany is justified in this war. More than justified. Righteous. He wants me to write a story that will help advance that theory in America.”

Einstein had just taken in a deep draw of his tobacco, and he turned his head a little away and blew the smoke to the mirrors. He turned back to me. Slowly now. The bright energy in him was gone.

He lowered his pipe.

A good reporter makes every person he questions think that whatever they say will be welcomed by a sympathetic ear, will be heard as true and persuasive and wise. Not only was this easy to do with Albert Einstein, it was a great relief. I’d been working in this way far too long and unrelievedly with Albert Stockman.

I said, “I have learned that you are someone whose sensibilities and values I might trust. Though given the people I’ve been involved with, I learned this about you indirectly, like an experiment where you cannot observe a thing directly but must infer it from its effects.”

In spite of his sudden gravity, Einstein smiled at this.

“The English gentleman is named Albert Stockman. Baron Stockman is subtle in his approach. The article, as he has conceived it, will focus entirely on the great humanitarian accomplishments of your colleague Doctor Fritz Haber. I am to write exclusively and glowingly about the Haber Process feeding the hungry of the world.”

I paused.

Einstein looked at his pipe, thinking, no doubt, to draw from it.

I said, “I will never quote you, Professor. But I feel as if things are going on that I need to know, and if I don’t know them, I’ll become part of a terrible deception.”

Einstein stared at his pipe a few moments more and then gently placed it on the makeup table, watching it all the way.

He lifted his eyes from the pipe but did not move them to me.

I turned my head to the mirror.

We looked at each other there.

He was silent still.

We continued to look at each other, our directness an illusion, bent together by the silvered surface.

His silence worried me. I decided to lead him a little. I said, “I realize that the same process produces explosives. Without limit.”

The face in the mirror looked away.

As did I.

And so our eyes met directly.

“Your intuition is correct, Mr. Hunter,” he said.

He did not let go of my gaze but he searched for words. I had to be patient now. I held very still.

“I am indebted to Professor Haber,” he said. “He brought me to the Institute. I have freedom here.”

He stopped.