The moe berg episodes, p.1
The Moe Berg Episodes, page 1
The back story of The Moe Berg Episodes collection starts with my friend Ben Bova, the novelist and editor. Ben and I had collaborated some years ago on a screen treatment about a fictionalized version of Moe Berg, a famous baseball player who became a spy during World War II. That ultimately came to nothing, but Ben’s deep baseball knowledge and his familiarity with Moe’s fascinating story got me started on writing about Moe. I grew up in a baseball family – my father played for the Red Sox and Phillies and Cardinals, and was a coach, a scout and a minor-league manager, until he retired in his 60s – but for some reason I hadn’t heard about Moe. I read Nicholas Dawidoff’s excellent biography, The Catcher Was a Spy: The Mysterious Life of Moe Berg, and that was it, I was hooked. I started reading everything I could find on Moe, including another excellent book, Heisenberg’s War: The Secret History of the German Bomb, by Thomas Powers. That book explores German physicist Werner Heisenberg and his leadership of the German A-bomb program during World War II. There’s quite a bit in the book about Moe Berg, including passages about the famous Zurich incident where Moe was incognito in the audience at a lecture by Heisenberg in neutral Switzerland, with orders to assassinate Heisenberg if it looked like the German program was close to building a super bomb. The incident has been fictionalized by some great writers, but I wanted to take my own crack at it and I did so in the story, “Something Real,” which appeared in Asimov’s in the April/May 2012 issue. I set it in an alternate history and got pretty wild with it. It was a great pleasure to write, and I was absurdly pleased when it won the 2012 Sidewise Award for Best Alternate History — Short Form.
The enjoyment of writing that story and placing it with Asimov’s led me to write another Moe Berg story for the magazine, At Palomar, which ran in the July 2013 issue, and then another, “In Dublin, Fair City,” which ran in the November/December 2017 issue, and then another, “The Secret City,” which came out in the September/October 2018 issue and is very much a follow-up to the Dublin story and by far the most ambitious of all my Moe Berg stories.
I should add that the novella, “The Wandering Warriors,” co-authored by Alan Smale and myself, might well be another Moe Berg story. Moe isn’t mentioned by name in that story, but Alan and I decided it would be fun – and that story is very much a fun romp – if the character of The Professor was suspiciously similar to Moe Berg. At least one major critic noticed the similarity and, in writing a very nice review of the story, assumed the character was Moe. The story ran in the May/June 2018 issue of Asimov’s and has been republished by New Word City publishing and is available on the usual sites as an ebook and in a limited print edition.
“The Secret City” seems, in some ways, to wrap up my alternate-history take on Moe’s career as a spy, just as that career received some notice. “The Secret City” came out just a month or so after the movie version of Moe’s work as a baseball player and OSS spy career hit the theaters and the streaming services. That movie, The Catcher Was a Spy, is based on Dawidoff’s biography.
The Moe Berg stories are focused on spycraft and baseball, in that order. But it’s important, I think, to not dodge the horrors that fascism in the 1930s and 1940s brought to our timeline, so I have them threaten the world similarly in Moe’s other timelines. In “The Secret City,” that anti-fascist thread runs right through the story. It includes an alternate take on famous German general Erwin Rommel, who was skeptical of Hitler’s plans in our reality and is even more skeptical in the alternate past I posit. I also have Moe in conversations with my alternate versions of OSS chief William “Wild Bill” Donovan and U.S. President Roosevelt (thought my Roosevelt is Eleanor). I even have a character who went through an alternate version of the Spanish Civil War and reminds Moe and his handler of the perils the world faces from fascism. All of this, I hope, adds a little heft to the importance of Moe’s work in the fight against fascism in that alternate universe.
I’ve put this New Word City reprint collection of the four stories in order as they appeared in the magazine. I very much think of them as episodes, linked by a common focus on Moe Berg in various alternate-history scenarios, but not telling a linked story, as such. You should read them as individual episodes about Moe, his spycraft, his baseball past, his quirky brilliance, the race between the American and German atom-bomb programs, and more.
And now for a bit of a tease. I’ve been thinking all along that this collection contains the first through the last of my stories about the very odd, and very interesting, Moe Berg. But I’ve gotten interested recently in the fascinating story of Hedy Lamarr, the Hollywood film star in the 1930s and 1940s who was also an inventor. Along with composer George Antheil she developed and patented a radio-guidance device that could be used to steer torpedoes toward the ships they were trying to sink. In our reality, that invention was patented but wasn’t used in the war effort. But in some alternate history I can see Hedy and Moe having some adventures in the North Atlantic or the English Channel, using this guidance system with its well-aimed torpedoes to sink the ship carrying heavy water to the site of the German bomb program. Sounds like fun, so watch for “Alternating Currents” sometime soon.
July 22, 1943
Baseball is a game of constant disappointment. You swing, and you mostly miss. You think it’s an easy grounder and it bad hops you. You’re called out at third trying to advance on a single. The pop foul to end the game drifts away from your glove as you reach over the rail. One thing after another, one game after another, one season after another; all of this in an endless progression of childish mediocrity.
No wonder he was depressed. Surely there were better things to do with one’s life than catch and throw and swing a stick at baseballs.
Moe Berg, M.S., M.A, Ph.D., LL.D., was a well-educated man, a scholar, a man of great promise. Yet here he sat, a baseball player, in the dugout at Comiskey Park watching the rain fall and gather into puddles atop the tarp that covered the infield. The puddles rippled in the wind, tiny oceans getting wider by the second. It had been raining steadily for a half-hour and then moments ago there’d been a bright bolt of lightning and an immediate and massive crack of thunder. And now it was really pouring. He was certain the game would be called in the next few minutes.
Moe had two hits on the day, a very nice opposite field homer to right, thank you very much, and a rare triple into the gap in left. The Sox were in front by six runs after three innings, but now none of that would matter; the would-be victory would disappear into the hiss of the rain and Moe’s home run and triple wouldn’t exist past today.
Perfect, just perfect. Like his season, like his whole career, like his life; the occasional good days were always washed away by a gray, cold rain. Now, instead of this one good day at the plate, there’d be a doubleheader tomorrow and he’d probably go 0 for the day or something close to that.
Every now and again it occurred to Moe that perhaps his father was right, perhaps it was time to retire from this child’s game and get started on real life. Perhaps it was time to do something that mattered, something real.
December 12, 1944
Moe Berg looked around the room. The thick wool drapes, so purple as to be nearly black, were tied back to allow the sunshine to spill through the narrow, tall windows that marched along the left side of the small lecture hall at the Physics Institute at the Eidgenossische Technische Hochscule, the ETH. The bright warmth of the room was a welcome luxury for a cold, December day in neutral Zurich.
Berg had heard just an hour ago that a few hundred miles away from this very spot, Patton’s Fifth Army was out of gas for the Shermans. This meant Von Rundstedt didn’t need to worry about an Allied relief column and so, short of a miracle like the clouds and fog clearing out unexpectedly so the P-47s could get back into business, the Nazi’s Sixth SS Panzer under Dietrich was going to break through Bastogne at any moment and from there it would be easy going as the tanks headed toward the fuel depot in Antwerp. Christ, the war might go on for another year or two.
A narrow lectern stood at the front of the room. A blackboard on wheels was behind the lectern, and there were two-dozen wooden chairs in tight, perfect rows in front of the lectern. There were no empty seats and an extra dozen people stood against the radiators at the back of the room. Paul Scherrer was there, of course, and nodded and smiled when he saw Berg. Marcus Fierz was there, too, and Gregor Wentzel, Wolfgang Pauli, Ernst Stueckelberg. And up in the front row, at the corner, Carl Friedrich von Weizsäcker.
Berg sat in the second row, where he was close enough to get the job done. He’d scored a marksman rating with a service revolver at this kind of distance. That was one reason he was here.
His pal, Paul Scherrer, had managed to get him the invitation to this speech, listing him as an Italian physicist working with Fermi in Rome. Berg felt bad about that, if he did do the job here it would get out soon that Scherrer had been involved. That would be messy; there were Nazis everywhere in Zurich. Berg had told Piet Gugelot, the Dutch Jew physicist, how to follow up on the arrangements to get Scherrer and his family out of Switzerland and down into Italy. From there, with Fermi’s help, they all could get to the States. Berg didn’t expect he’d be able to help with any of that, since he wouldn’t survive more than a few seconds after taking action against Heisenberg. Too many Nazis in the room, all of them armed. Once they realized that the Italian physicist named Antonacci was, in fact, an American assassin, they’d act quickly.
Berg looked like he belonged in this crowd: brown shoes, slacks, tweed jacket.
He’d earned a little credit, he hoped, by working his way into a couple of the interesting conversations on S-matrix theory that had been going on in the hallway outside before the door opened to the room. Berg liked the elegance of the math and had said so to several people, citing examples. They’d nodded and agreed, the several men then bouncing ideas of one another for a few minutes until the classroom door opened and, along with the others, Berg had walked in and taken a seat.
He crossed his right leg over the left and sat back, relaxed, as the last few stragglers came in, looking for a little space in which to join the others who stood at the back. The last to come through was a tall, very attractive woman. Stueckelberg rose and offered her his seat and she took it.
Berg knew this woman. He was sure it was her; a real looker, tall, thin, black hair, red lips, wearing a very businesslike dress with padded shoulders and a vest. He wondered if there wasn’t a gun hidden somewhere in all that fabric.
He’d seen her now several different times over the past couple of years. He was certain of it; he had a very good memory for such things. The first time, back in ‘41, she’d been sitting in the box seats, front row, behind the home dugout in Comiskey as the White Sox did battle with the Browns on a Sunday in June. Not much of a crowd there, the Sox being all right but the Brownies miserable. Berg had played first that day and had himself an RBI double and then scored on an Alex Irvine single. He’d tipped his cap to the few fans who were cheering after he’d crossed home and was heading toward the dugout. She’d smiled at him. He’d winked back and then had the batboy take a note up to her saying he was staying at the Piccadilly Hotel on Wabash, and he’d be pleased to celebrate the day’s win by taking her out to dinner. He’d look for her at eight o’clock in the lobby. The chophouse had great steaks, but she didn’t show.
The second time, a year later, he’d been in London, at the Claridge, working on Alsos. She’d been sitting in the lobby reading the Times and had lowered it to watch him walk by, smiling at him knowingly. He’d smiled back, but he was already late for the meeting with Carvelli to make the final arrangements for Italy and Fermi, and so he didn’t have the time to do more than smile and nod. She’d nodded back, still smiling. An hour later, when he walked back out through the lobby, she was gone.
The next time, in Paris just a couple of months later, he felt a friendly tap on his shoulder then heard her say, “Bonjour, Monsieur Berg,” as she’d walked by him one evening on the Pont Neuf, where he’d been leaning on the railing, watching a barge go by on the Seine below. He’d turned, embarrassed that he hadn’t noticed her until after she’d touched him, but she was already walking away, half-turning to wave goodbye. He was waiting for a contact and couldn’t leave the spot and had to watch her go. He felt dizzy and nauseous for a moment and when that passed he turned back toward the Seine and the same barge from before was somehow upstream and starting its way down again to go under the bridge, again, as he watched. There was no explaining that and he was afraid to mention it to anyone: They’d pull him out of there and bring him home as a head case, probably, and he didn’t want that.
The last time, six months ago in Rome, he’d been sitting outside under the awning at the Trattoria Monti on Via di San Vito, with Fermi, talking about what Italy had been like under Mussolini before the assassination in ‘38. A dirigible, a fast little Enzo on sentry duty, chugged by overhead. Fifty miles north was the Lateran Line and north of that there were Germans, a lot of them. Here, in Roma, though, the sun was shining, and Italy was Italian again.
Enrico was talking when she walked by: “Yes, Moe, all of Italy was ours, but the price was so very high. Spies everywhere (as though there weren’t any now, Berg thought to himself), and one feared for one’s soul.” Enrico smiled. “When the coup d’ etat was successful, we all thought the nightmare had ended; but, of course, it wasn’t so simple.”
She’d been hard to miss in that outfit; blue shorts and a white blouse with a blue scarf and a sailor cap. Her hair was different, red, and she seemed taller somehow, but it was definitely her. And she was stunning.
Enrico had turned to look at her, said “Buongiorno.”
She buongiornoed right back to Enrico, then looked straight at Berg, smiled, said, “Ciao, Signor Berg,” and walked away. Moe winked at Enrico, then rose from the table to follow her, caught up with her by the time they reached the Trevi Fountain, reached out and grabbed her arm so he could finally talk to her and find out what the hell was going on. But then he stumbled, went down to his knees, sick to his stomach for a few moments, and when that passed he looked up and she was gone. As was the Trevi Fountain. He was standing next to the Colle Oppio gardens and there, a few blocks away, was the Coliseum. Jesus Christ. He shook his head and started walking back to Enrico. Good thing it was close.
So, he wasn’t surprised to see her here, though she was a major complication, and Berg didn’t like complications. He had a job to do here, dangerous work, and if she had been in Chicago, and London, and Paris, and Rome, and now was here, then she was in on it somehow. One side? The other? Some other side completely? He didn’t know. He didn’t like not knowing. He had to ask himself why he hadn’t brought her up with John Shaheen, his handler.
He shifted in his chair, putting both feet back on the floor. He could feel the uncomfortable tug of the athletic tape that held the tiny Beretta tightly against his groin. Well, there was nothing he could do about her right now. He was here, and today was today, and that was all there was to it. He had a job to do.
The door at the side of the room opened again and in walked Werner Heisenberg. There was a smattering of polite applause from the gathered scientists. How do you greet a colleague and friend, and one of the world’s great minds, when he’s brilliant but working for the Nazis? Heisenberg was in charge of Uranverein, the Uranium Club, which is to say, Hitler’s A-bomb program.
But this wasn’t about that, at least for everyone but Berg. So when Paul Scherrer walked to the podium to introduce Heisenberg, Berg sat back in his chair and made sure to look calm and relaxed. Time to listen. Very carefully.
September 5, 1943
A dismal season was winding down. Moe Berg had played first-base again and gone 0 for 5 as the Sox lost to the Yankees. Berg’s contribution to the humiliation had been three strikeouts and an error on a groundball.
In the clubhouse after the game, the air was thick with cigar smoke, grumbling, and Monarch beer to drown the various sorrows. Moe sat, disappointed, on a folding chair in front of his open wooden locker. He was contemplating what an 0-for-5 day can do to your psyche and your season and your career when you’re in your thirties. He heard a throat clear behind him. Damn sportswriters.
He turned and instead of the rumpled, old suit, and beat-up fedora that he expected, it was a man dressed in trousers with a tight crease, a vest, an expensive coat and a bowtie; no hat, glasses, smoking a Camel.
“Mr. Berg? Moe?”
Berg shook his head. “I’m not speaking to the press, friend. I made that clear last week. No quotes, no off-the-record, nothing, till this slump is over. Got it?”
The man smiled and was nice enough to not get into whether a .210 season batting average is still a “slump” or not. “I’m not with the press, Mr. Berg. My name is Huntington, Ellery Huntington. I’m here at the request of a man named William Donovan. He’d like to meet with you.”
Berg frowned. “The Donovan who was a war hero in the Meuse-Argonne? And then the district attorney up in Buffalo? I believe I met him once, a few years ago. We shook hands and I autographed a ball for him.”
“You have an excellent memory, Mr. Berg.”
He did, in fact, have that excellent memory. And an IQ of 180. And a doctorate in classical languages from Princeton. And a law degree from Yale. And yet he was playing baseball in Chicago and, mostly, going 0-for-the-day. So: “What would the district attorney and war hero want with a baseball player, Mr. Huntington?”
