“Do you still tinker with the Time Slicer?” he asked.

  “Who me?” Calista laughed. “No. Charley does a little.”

  “You still have one then?”

  “Yeah—off the record that is.”

  “Why off the record?”

  “To tell you the truth I don’t know. Oliver Harrison said.” She stopped abruptly. “Of course you don’t know Oliver Harrison. He was Tom’s mentor. He said commercial types would be dying to get a patent on it. So I should be quiet about it and consider getting a patent lawyer. Protection I guess.”

  “So is Harrison keeping it?”

  Calista was perplexed. “No, why?” It seemed like a strange question. “He wasn’t worried about it getting actually stolen. Listen, in your line of work I know that people do walk out of museums with little goodies. Scholars are the worst. Did Diane show you the cage over at the Cyclotron where they put visiting academics and bring in the collections to show them?”

  “Ah, yes.” Von Sackler laughed. “Physicists are a more honorable lot.”

  “Not necessarily,” Calista replied. “But the net worth of the hardware in the Time Sheer is probably about fifteen bucks total. To run off with it would not have much intrinsic value. It’s not quite the same as tucking a pre-Columbian vase in your satchel.”

  “So the Time Sheer was a playful digression, so to speak?” “Yes. A few summers ago we had all been out time slicing in Wyoming at a site. The National Geographic did an article on it. I mean, let’s face it, Wyoming was more appropriate, not to mention accessible, for a family vacation than a black hole.”

  “I don’t understand your meaning?” Von Sackler leaned forward. “Black holes. Those were Tom’s specialty. It’s a theoretical concept. But they are real,” she quickly added.

  “Oh, those black holes. Not that I know that much about them.” “Nobody does. Astronomers are just on the brink of showing that they exist by observation. But Tom, and other theoreticians, like Stephen Hawking at Cambridge, have pulled together an incredibly detailed picture.”

  “But he was just time slicing at Rosestone?” von Sackler said, directing the conversation back to the applied aspects of Tom’s work.

  “Yeah. There’s plenty of zinc and other transitional elements in the rocks and soil out there and the Sheer was good at picking up very fine magnetic noise in these trace elements. Tom could then extrapolate from these little noise peaks of magnetism a lot of very refined dating information. Basically it tied in with polarity reversals but it can slice the time much closer, more accurately, because the magnetic poles are moving slowly all the time. Actually it all started out with the earth sciences folks getting all excited about a new way of figuring the time periods that it took for certain depositional sediment layers to get laid down. Then the paleontologists started getting interested in it. And pretty soon it was, you know, like they say, not since sliced bread, except it was time, and everyone and their grandmother was getting excited about the Time Slicer and . . .”

  “And Tom was seeking bigger things beyond machines, beyond instruments.”

  “It was just that.” Calista looked at von Sackler levelly. “An instrument, a tool. As I said, Tom’s life was dedicated to thinking about gravity and matter.”

  “Calista, I know very little about physics—applied or theoretical. And you say you know very little too. Your field after all is illustration. But there is something that both puzzles and intrigues me about you.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Although you say much of what your husband did is beyond you, you seem to have a ...” Von Sackler stopped. “How should I say this?” He began again. “I can sense that you have an interest that is based upon more than just your love for your husband. You apparently have been drawn in some genuine way toward the theoretical physics, toward astrophysics, and the—how do you call it—cosmology?”

  It seemed to Calista that there was something rather extraordinary about his perception of her interest. Nobody had ever asked her this before, but it was almost as if she had been waiting for someone to ask her just this question for years. “It’s very simple, really, Werner. Although much of Tom’s work is beyond me and he was a physicist and I am an illustrator, we both were interested in hidden parts of the universe, and how those parts work and fit together, and why the universe began and if and how and why it will end.”

  Chapter 10

  The waiter brought the check and Calista got up to leave. Von Sackler escorted her through the Arlington Street exit and waited with her until her car was brought round. He gave her a squeeze around the shoulders. He watched her pull away from the curb. He turned to go into the hotel and looked at his watch—1:00 a.m.

  He could call the Berlin office. The workday would be just under way. He could call Neuberg. Frau Holbein would have just finished bathing Papa. If the weather was good the two would be taking coffee on the sunbaked Der Balkon Fluss, the river-view balcony, and he could first chat with Herr Dortmund and check if any more monies had been intercepted on the way to Caracas. The flow had been stemmed but occasionally his father, despite his infirmities, seemed to be able to negotiate an end run around Dortmund and get the Deutch- marks off. He felt sure that Frau Holbein helped on those occasions. Although it was hardly to her advantage to aid and abet in the withering of the already depleted estate. Oh! He did not want to think about any of this. Neither home nor office afforded a jot of comfort these days.

  The museum, administratively speaking, was in a state of suspension due to the director’s prolonged illness. He should really call to inquire about Karl Wilfried. It was important that a message be left every day at the clinic that Herr von Sackler had called and inquired. He had faithfully visited Karl Wilfried twice weekly, taken Gerta to tea at least three times a month, had smoked hams sent from Burg Valdhof more than once, and arranged for their rather unattractive teenaged son to go sailing in the Frisian Islands with old friends of his. He looked at his watch again as he rode up in the elevator. Perhaps it would make more sense to call the museum than the clinic at this hour. He could talk with his own secretary as well as Karl Wilfried’s—two birds with one stone.

  Still, it was an unpleasant business, he thought, especially when compared to this evening. Despite the rather alarming news concerning this Gardiner fellow he had found Calista Jacobs quietly provocative. There were those hooded eyes that gave no hints really except perhaps to suggest a glinting kind of hieratic sorcery from which her work came. There was also a sort of dense luxuriance about her. All this was totally unexpected in an American woman. Well, perhaps he was being a bit narrow on that score. But indeed there was nothing like her in terms of European woman either. She had money, was used to money, he thought, yet was totally undisturbed by, or not concerned with, money. He envied her this. He envied her calm as he put the key in the door. He really must call—both calls—Neuberg and Berlin.

  The call had gone through quite quickly. Indeed it all seemed to have happened much too quickly for a call that was supposed to be routine but turned out to be quite upsetting. What could he have said to Karl Wilfried’s secretary, that silly Fraulein Dohm, when she had so breathily responded to his inquiry regarding Herr Director’s health? “Ah, Herr von Sackler, you have not then heard the news?” No, had he died? Worse—resigned and Guth had been appointed the new director. Not “interim,” not “acting,” but the director. Von Sackler had sat there on the side of the bed in his shorts stunned as he held the receiver and heard the animated burble of chatter coming from Fraulein Dohm. She was prattling on about how excited she was to be receiving a call from Boston.

  “Boston—is that not John Kennedy’s home? My mother held me in her arms in front of the City Hall when he came to Berlin and said ‘Ich bin ein Berliner.’ Have you seen any Kennedys?”

  “No!” von Sackler barked. “They do not walk them on the street like dogs.” Unbelievable! More prattle about clearing out the office and the painters and carpenters coming in. It was going to be beautiful. She would have her own office adjoining Herr Guth’s. Von Sackler almost desperately wanted to ask her about the smoked hams, the countless teas with Gerta, the Frisian sailing jaunt arranged for Marius, the daily calls to the clinic, not to mention the fourteen, no fifteen years of his unswerving dedication to making a place that, literally in shambles after the war, had come to be regarded as one of the finest collections of primitive art and ethnographic materials in the world. It had not been done without risk either, or sacrifice.

  Certainly if he had known about his father’s proclivities toward channeling funds to “the boys,” as he called them, he would have given more serious thought to something more practical, a business career. Perhaps the time had come. It was, after all, not museum business exclusively that had drawn him here. Perhaps it was time to think about more remunerative ventures. The other business could not be considered highly remunerative. However, following the one-for-one retaliation by the Kremlin last spring Gauss had suggested that the Americans would be most interested in utilizing some of his people for some work in Moscow for which there would be good money. Von Sackler had come to mind because of a recent cultural exchange program between the Kremlin Gallery and the Altertumskunde. At the time he had declined. It would involve a leave of absence from the Altertumskunde and a whole year in Moscow. Three weeks in Moscow had been enough two years before when he had gone along with Sir Mitford-Phillips from the Victoria and Albert to see the restoration work being done on the frescoes in the Kremlin Assumption Cathedral. A year was unthinkable. He had instead preferred these short containable assignments that he had had over the years. The double life was essentially distasteful to von Sackler.

  “You think of it as a cloak,” Gauss had said to him one afternoon at the Cafe Kranzler after he had refused the Moscow assignment.

  “What?” von Sackler asked, slightly bewildered by Gauss’s comment.

  “The work, the life,” Gauss said simply. Von Sackler stared at him. It was rather surprising a man like Gauss speaking in metaphorical terms. Von Sackler was not entirely comfortable with it. “You think,” Gauss continued, “that you can put it on and take it off like a cloak. But you can’t because it is not a cloak. It is part of you. It is like the man who cheated on his wife. He could fool his wife and he could fool himself. He could for weeks, months go without cheating, not even thinking about it, being a good husband, which he was when he was not cheating. Then one night he meets a girl on the Ku’damm. He goes to her place. Then suddenly in the middle of it all he climbs off her. Why? Because he has a sixth sense that his wife needs him. So he rushes home not even clean from the tart to his wife.” Gauss picked up his beer.

  “And?” Von Sackler waited.

  “And what?”

  “What happened to the wife?”

  “Oh it does not matter. She needed him. He was there. The important part was this. He realized at one time he was both a good husband and a cheat, and one did not cancel out the other because it was his nature.”

  “And he lived happily ever after,” von Sackler said sourly. “Being true to his nature.”

  “Yes.” Gauss set down his beer. “You like this story?” He smiled.

  “Not particularly. But then again I don’t think you do particularly well with metaphor.”

  “What?” It had been Gauss’s turn to be surprised.

  “Metaphor—cloaks and tarts.”

  “Oh.” Gauss had laughed and brushed his hand in a gesture of dismissal.

  Von Sackler knew exactly what Gauss was thinking. That he was an arrogant son of a bitch. And he was that with good reason, compared to Gauss and his people. That was precisely the trouble with the whole business. The people who did it. He was not like any of them and he could wear the cloak when and if he wanted.

  Of course putting on the cloak at the moment was just slightly more complicated because he had found Mrs. Jacobs rather attractive. But that would make it more interesting. Again those cretins in Berlin had given him pictures that had hardly done her justice. Why hadn’t they used her author photos, which were quite nice? They always did things in the most circuitous fashion. Here he had gone into Harvard Square that afternoon and found at least ten of her books all bearing lovely photographs of her on the dust jackets. Very attractive. But she would be manageable and enjoyable.

  He arranged his trousers on the hanger in the closet. He brushed some lint off the lapels of his jacket. He laughed. Indeed, he was becoming more fastidious these days. Perhaps he was worried about becoming like his father—an old Nazi in a copper-roofed palace living out his dying days wrapped in a soup-stained velvet smoking jacket.

  Chapter 11

  She could not sleep. It was like those bad nights right after it had happened 425 nights ago. She should, Calista counseled herself, think about von Sackler. She bet he owned and probably wore, at least four times a year, evening pumps. There was that kind of vestigial elegance in his manner. It was rather heartening to see a man so well turned out, one that was comfortably correct in dress rather than “cool and correct.” This was a phrase she noticed had become a favorite in New York Times ads for men’s clothes. He had none of that wan, fey stylishness of those male models. That was her only basis for sartorial comparison seeing that none of the men she knew gave a hoot about dress.

  She rhetorically wondered, and then answered her own question, why she was thinking about his clothes. A device, no doubt. A device for what? To redirect her away from what was underneath the clothes. Approach-avoidance. Denial of her own sexuality. A convoluted double irony: thinking about pumps, sublimating balls. The voice of her old college friend Harriet droned in its irritably soft tones in her ear as it had twenty years before when she had urged Calista to shuck her virginity in service of liberating her energies for her art. Despite her virginity she must have been precocious, for even then Calista had realized he .v tedious nineteen-year-olds could be on the subject of sex. No, as far as she had been concerned, that sophomore year there was nobody really worth it. Not that she was looking for the love of her life before she would climb into bed. But he had to be very attractive and the prospects had to be at least mildly erotic.

  Harriet had no such stipulations. She was not just concupiscent. She was a “celebrant of venery” as she had once put it. “A merry deer hunter?” Calista had asked. Harriet passed over the joke, but it hadn’t really been entirely a joke. Calista had honestly thought that venery had something to do with deer hunting. How had she gotten into Bryn Mawr thinking that? The word wasn’t included in the verbal part of the S.A.T. In any case, she had blown her best chance at venery or shucking her virginity when as a senior in high school Geoffrey Field had pressed her toward such activity in his Thunderbird and she had refused. He was quite handsome and it was a fifty-five Thunderbird. There certainly had never been a lovelier car. Years later she had seen one enshrined in an automobile museum, the last of its species. To think that she had missed such a rare, low-slung, well-designed sporty stab at venery all because he had referred to her “cherry.” But she had actually gagged when he said it. Not only had she always loathed this objectification of virginity, but the word choice itself made her think of a Whitman’s Sampler with those cloying chocolate-covered cherries. Ick! She had wanted to go home and gargle with Listerine. When she had told Harriet this, Harriet had blanched and recommended she repair immediately to a “good Jungian analyst.”

  She subsequently in her junior year had, as she told Harriet one day on campus during a January thaw, “become venerable.” Harriet of course missed the joke. It was somewhat less than erotic but altogether pleasurable. By spring break it was over. He was Israeli and at the University of Pennsylvania and had to return home because his mother was having a cataract operation. But by the following January of her senior year she had met Tom and it was wonderful.

  They had venerated on the first date. She had gone with a girl friend to Princeton for a weekend. Her intended blind date hadn’t worked out. Tom, a graduate fellow in the Institute of Advanced Studies, had come to the party where Calista and her date had sat stiffly for what seemed like hours in viscous silence. From her position on the couch she had seen Tom in the entry way of the house. He was slightly older than the other students, but there was also a different quality about him. Everyone else was relentlessly Ivy Leag'e and even though it was the sixties, it still was Princeton, which seemed to spawn those thin, overbred Fitzgerald types. Tom, on the other hand, had a pleasantly unkempt quality. She later realized that this seemed to be congenital to physicists—their hair was always ruffled as if the owner was constantly trying to establish some sort of tactile connection with his or her brain.

  Tom’s hair was a deep burnished red and, although not as long as the fashion of the day permitted, it was quite thick and swirled with cowlicks. He was not wearing the de rigueur tweed or cord jacket with jeans but instead wore a battered brown leather zippered one, the kind Chuck Yeager used to wear. From Calista’s vantage point on the couch he looked more like a test pilot than a student at Princeton, more comfortable at Bradley Field than Cottage Club. In profile he was quite compelling. In full face, as he turned toward the room, he was devastating. He had those long vertical dimples that creased either side of his face just below the cheekbones and gave the face a taut sinewed character, and which she supposed was the central quality that came across—a muscled grace. Although tall, he was not heavily built, but his entire being seemed to contain a musculature that went beyond sheer strength. It was interesting that, as Tom’s reputation grew, as he published more, people in reference to his thinking would talk or write of the suppleness of his mind, the agility of his intellect, the “sinewed grace” of his theory, the musculature of his equations.