“Don’t you have crutches?” she asks.
“Yes, I do.”
The taxi jerks away from the curb, into the swarming melee of Berlin traffic. After the somnolence of Oxford, Violet can’t quite get used to the way the automobiles and carts and delivery wagons crowd the streets of the energetic German capital, even at ten o’clock at night on the first Saturday in June. She looks out the window at the sidewalk. A café swims past her eyes, wriggling with people, students in shabby brown suits and prostitutes in bright silks. They are all so happy, so full of purpose even while lounging about a café, smoking and drinking. Violet thinks of her dark laboratory, her green-white fireworks of atomic energy, the minute scale of her life’s work.
“How was the party?” she asks. “I hope we haven’t ruined your evening.”
“Not at all. The party was full of German officials in a frenzy of enjoyment, if you can picture it. They’re all about to head off for their summer amusements, the lucky ones, at any rate.”
“I’m sorry to have torn you away.”
“They can spare me, I assure you. Tell me, Mr. Mortimer, how you’re enjoying your summer this far.”
“Very much, sir. I assisted Mrs. Grant with her scintillations today. The most extraordinary thing I’ve ever seen.”
Lionel laughs aloud. “Yes, I remember it well. I used to be Dr. Grant’s assistant, a few years ago, before Mrs. Grant swept in and stole his heart away.”
“Were you?”
“Hasn’t your mother told you anything? Yes, I was the first man to count those little flashes of light.” He pauses. He hasn’t replaced his hat, and his sleek black hair curves in a perfect arc against the blue darkness around them. He tilts his face back toward them. “Do you know what amazed me most? All that space.”
“Yes.” Henry leans forward eagerly.
Lionel holds up his hand. In the yellow-gray flash of a passing streetlamp, it seems unnaturally large, shadow-rugged, each finger thick with strength. “You see? That this apparently solid and immutable flesh, that everything around us, is only empty space. Empty space, with a few lonely bits of electrical energy spinning about inside. That only one particle from the radium in perhaps ten thousand actually finds a nucleus to collide with. The rest simply stream along unseen, unknowing even, right through the damned gold foil.”
“Astonishing, isn’t it?” Violet stares at Lionel’s hand.
He lowers his hand and turns to gaze out his own window. They are hurtling down Unter den Linden, a lamplit blur of cafés and people and ambitious new hotels. “I found it rather terrifying, in fact. Knowing this solid world around us is as insubstantial as a dream. Realizing the vast emptiness surrounding every bloody speck of matter in the universe.”
Without warning, the taxicab staggers to a throaty halt before a woman in a floating red silk gown, who dances with abandon in the middle of the street. Her eyes are closed to the astonished traffic around her. The streetlamps gleam like oil on her writhing bare arms.
“Mein Gott,” mutters the driver. He steers the taxi cautiously around the dancer. As the automobile slides past, she opens her eyes and gazes into the rear window, directly at Violet. She taps the glass with a long lacquered finger, throws back her head and laughs, and then she’s gone, disappeared into the tangle of lights and traffic behind them.
“Ah, Berlin,” says Lionel.
“A friend of yours, perhaps?” Violet thinks of the woman’s low neckline, her heavy unbound breasts like pendula beneath clouds of red silk. The mockery of that laugh.
“Not that I can recall,” says Lionel blandly.
The car turns down Franz?sischestrasse and pulls up before a splendid block of apartments, rising perhaps sixteen floors in an extravagant explosion of stonework. Lionel springs out of the taxi, pivots gracefully about his cane, and opens the door for Henry. “I’ll just be a moment,” he says to Violet.
Henry looks over his shoulder. “Good night, Mrs. Grant.”
“Good night, Mr. Mortimer. Thank you for your assistance.”
Violet stares ahead at the back of the driver’s head. Franz?sischestrasse is much quieter than Unter den Linden, a residential street, no café in sight. The sultry smell of petrol exhaust curls around her nose; the seat rumbles gently beneath her dress.
The door opens. Lionel slides in next to her and leans forward to address the driver. “Kronenstrasse. Number sixteen, isn’t that right, Mrs. Grant?”
“Yes. But you don’t need to take me there.”
“Nonsense. It’s on my way.”
“Back to your party, I suppose.”