There were eight scientists in Dr. Kiel’s department. They all had graduate students, they all taught undergraduate classes at the university, but Abigail and Rhonda both knew that none of the other scientists worked as hard as Dr. Kiel. He was always traveling, too, to different scientific conventions, or overseas. Rhonda hadn’t been working for him when he went to Czechoslovakia three years ago, but she was making travel arrangements for him now. He was going to Washington, to San Francisco, and then to Israel.
Even though Dr. Kiel had an explosive temper, he had a sense of camaraderie that his colleagues lacked. He also had an intensity about his work that spilled over into the lives of his students and staff. His students and lab techs were expected to work long hours, do night shifts, attend evening seminars. Perhaps in exchange, he took a personal interest in their families, their hobbies, took his male students fishing, bought his female students records or books for their birthdays. When he went to New York in August, he brought Rhonda back a scarf from the gift store in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
Dr. Kiel had a wife and five lumpy, sullen children: Abigail met them when Dr. Kiel had everyone in the department out to his house for a picnic right after school started. He never seemed to think about his children the way he did about his staff and students.
It was Dr. Kiel who suggested that feeding the animals might make Abigail feel that she was part of the team. He seemed to sense her loneliness; he would quiz her on her classes, her music. He also knew better than to tease a ten-year-old about boys, the way Dr. Dolan did.
When Rhonda worried about the diseases the animals were infected with, Dr. Kiel assured her that Abigail would not be allowed in the contamination room. “And if some Q Fever germ is brave enough to come through the door and infect her, we keep tetracycline on hand.” He showed Rhonda the bottle of orange pills in one of his glass-doored cabinets. “I’ve had Q, and so has Bob Pharris. Watch out for a high fever and a dry cough, with aching joints; let me know if either of you start having symptoms.”
“High fever, dry cough,” Abigail repeated to herself. Every day when she went in to feed the animals, she checked Miss Bianca for a fever or a cough. “Do your joints ache?” she would ask the mouse, feeling her head the way Mother felt her own head when she was sick.
Elena Mirova’s arrival unsettled the lab. She was quiet, efficient; she did whatever was asked of her and more besides. She worked with Bob and Dr. Kiel’s other two graduate students, often giving them suggestions on different ways to set up experimental apparatus or helping them interpret slides they were studying.
“Czech dishwashers know more science than ours in America,” Bob said one day when Elena flipped through the back pages of the Journal of Cell Biology to show him an article that explained apoptosis in Rickettsia prowazekii.
Elena turned rigid, her face white, then hurriedly left the room, saying she heard the autoclave bell ringing.
“It’s the Communists,” Rhonda explained to her daughter when Abigail reported the episode to her.
“It was so weird,” Abigail said. “It was like she thought Bob was mad at her. Besides, she was lying, the autoclave bell didn’t ring.”
“The Russians put her husband in prison,” Rhonda said. “She’s afraid that they’ll try to find her here.”
That frightened Abigail. Everyone knew how evil the Communists were; they wanted to take over America, they wanted to take over the whole world. America stood for freedom and the Communists wanted to destroy freedom.
“What if they come to the lab to get Elena and kill you instead?” she asked her mother. “Are the mice safe? Will they want the mice?”
Dr. Dolan came into Dr. Kiel’s office at that moment. “Of course they want the mice; the mice are our most important secret.”
Abigail rushed down to the animal room to make sure Miss Bianca was still safe. The mouse was nibbling on a piece of food, but she came to the front of the cage as soon as Abigail arrived. Abigail was about to take her out when she saw that Bob was in the contamination room.
Instead, she stroked the mouse’s head through the cage door. “I wish I could take you home, Miss Bianca,” she whispered.
When Bob came out and went into the back room to scrub himself down in the big sink, Abigail followed him.
“Do you think Elena is a Communist spy?” she demanded.
“Where do you come up with these ideas, short stuff?” Bob asked.
“Dr. Dolan said the Communists want our mice, because they’re our most important secret.”
“Dr. Dolan talks a lot of guff,” Bob said. “There’s nothing secret about the mice, and Elena is not a Communist. She ran away from the Communists.”
“But she lied about the autoclave. She didn’t like you saying how smart she was.”
Bob stopped drying his arms to stare at her. “You’re as small as the mice, so we don’t notice you underfoot. Look: there’s nothing secret about our mice. We get a grant—you know what that is? Money. We get money from the army, so we do some work for the army. The disease Dr. Kiel works with can make people very sick. If our soldiers got sick in Vietnam, they wouldn’t be able to fight, so Dr. Kiel and I and his other students are trying to find a way to keep them from getting sick.”
“But he has that drug, he showed my mom,” Abigail said.
“That’s great if you’re already sick, but if you’re in the middle of a battle, it would be better not to get sick to start with. It would be hard for the army to get enough of the drug to our soldiers out in the jungles and rice paddies while the Vietcong were firing rockets at them.”
“Oh,” Abigail said. “You’re trying to make a shot, like for polio.”
“And the mice are helping us. We give them some of Dr. Kiel’s disease, and then we study whether we’ve learned any way to prevent them from getting sick.”
After Bob went back to the lab, Abigail took Miss Bianca from the cage and let her sit in her pocket, where she had a lump of sugar. “Even if the mice can help win a war with the Communists, I think it would be better if you didn’t get sick.”
She practiced her violin for half an hour. The scratchy sounds she got from the strings sounded more like the squeaks the mice made than Bach, but neither she nor the animals minded. When she finished, she took Miss Bianca out of her pocket to ride on her shoulder. When she heard voices outside the animal room door she crouched down, holding Miss Bianca in her hand.
“Mamelouk is here,” she whispered. “Don’t squeak.”
It wasn’t Mamelouk, it was Dr. Kiel with Elena. Elena’s face was very white, the way it had been when she first came into the lab. She fumbled in her handbag and produced a vial with something red in it that Abigail was sure was blood.
“I hope is sterile. Hard job doing self. Myself,” Elena said.
Abigail bent her head over her knees, so Miss Bianca wouldn’t have to see such a dreadful sight. After Dr. Kiel and Elena left the animal room, she stayed bent over for a long time, but finally went up to the floor where the labs and offices were.
Her mother wasn’t in the outer office, but the typewriter was still uncovered, which meant she was either taking dictation from Dr. Kiel or in the ladies’ room. The door to Dr. Kiel’s inner office wasn’t shut all the way; Abigail walked over to peer through the crack.
Dr. Dolan was there. He had a nasty look on his face. The vein in Dr. Kiel’s forehead was throbbing, always a bad sign.
“I got the library to order back copies of the Czech Journal of Virology, and no one named Mirov is on the editorial pages,” Dr. Dolan said.
“I didn’t know you could read Czech, Patrick,” Dr. Kiel said. “I thought you moved your lips when you read English.”
Abigail wanted to laugh, it was such a funny insult. Maybe she could use it the next time Susie Campbell taunted her about her parents’ divorce.
“Don’t try to change the subject, Kiel,” Dr. Dolan said. “Are you or aren’t you harboring a Communist here? What kind of back
ground check did you do on your protégée before you let her into a lab doing sensitive work for the government?”
“I met her husband in Bratislava three years ago,” Dr. Kiel said coldly. “We were correspondents until the tanks rolled in last year and the Soviets put him in prison as an enemy of the state. Elena came here in danger of her life.”
“Correspondents? Or lovers?” Dr. Dolan sneered.
Abigail put a hand over her mouth. Lovers, like her father and the new Mrs. Sherwood out in California. Was Elena turning Mrs. Kiel into a single mom for the five lumpy Kiel children?
“Maybe you grew up in a pigsty,” Dr. Kiel said. “But in my family—”
“Your Communist family.”
“What are you, Dolan? A stooge for HUAC?”
“The FBI has a right to know what you were really doing in Bratislava three years ago. You work with a weapons-grade organism, you speak Russian, you travel—”
“The operative word here being work,” Dr. Kiel said. “If you worked on listeria as energetically as you do on spying on my lab, you’d have won the Nobel Prize by now.”
Mother came into the outer office just then and dragged Abigail to the hall. “Since when do you eavesdrop, young lady?” she demanded.
“But, Mom, it’s about Elena. She’s lying all the time, her husband didn’t work for that magazine in Czechoslovakia, Dr. Dolan said. He says she’s stealing Dr. Kiel away from Mrs. Kiel, like that lady who stole Daddy from us. And Elena just gave Dr. Kiel something funny in the animal room. It looked like blood, but maybe it’s a magic potion to make him forget Mrs. Kiel.”
Rhonda stared down at her daughter in exasperation, but also in sadness. “Abigail, I’m not sure it’s such a good idea for you to come here after school. You hear things that are outside your experience and then you get upset by them. Elena is not going to break up Dr. Kiel’s marriage, I promise you. Let’s see if I can find someone to stay with you after school, okay?”
“No, Mom, no, I have to come here, I have to look after Miss Bianca.”
Elena came into the hall where they were standing. She’d been in the lab but they hadn’t seen her. Rhonda and Abigail both flushed.
“Sorry,” Elena murmured. “I making all lives hard, but I not understanding, why is Dr. Dolan not like me?”
Rhonda shook her head. “He’s jealous of Dr. Kiel, I think, and so he tries to attack the people who work for Dr. Kiel. Try not to pay attention to him.”
“But Dr. Dolan said your husband’s name wasn’t in—in the Czech something, the magazine,” Abigail piped up, to Rhonda’s annoyance.
Elena didn’t speak for a moment; her face turned white, as it had in the animal room earlier in the afternoon. “No, he is scientist, he is reading articles, deciding is science good or not good? He telling editor, but only editor name in Journal, not husband.”
Dr. Dolan stormed out of Dr. Kiel’s office, his round cheeks swollen with anger. “You were quite a devoted wife, Elena, if you studied your husband’s work so much that you understand rickettsial degradation by lysosomal enzymes,” he said sarcastically.
“I married many years, I learning many things,” Elena said. “Now I learning how live with husband in prison. I also learn acid rinse glassware, forgive me.”
She brushed past Dolan and went down the hall to the autoclave room, where the pressure machine washed glassware at a temperature high enough to kill even the peskiest bacterium.
Over the weekend, Bob and the other graduate students took care of the animals. On Monday, Abigail hurried anxiously back to the lab after school. Bob was in the animal room with a strange man who was wearing a navy suit and a white shirt. None of the scientists ever dressed like that: they were always spilling acids that ate holes in their clothes. Even Mother had to be careful when she went into the lab—once Bob accidentally dripped acid on her leg and her nylons dissolved.
“But she has access to the animals?”
Bob was shifting unhappily from one foot to the other. He didn’t see Abigail, but she was sure the man in the suit was talking about her. She crept behind the cages into the alcove where the big sinks stood.
Bob was putting on a mask and gloves to go into the contamination room, but the man in the suit seemed to be afraid of the germs; he said he didn’t need to go into the room.
“I just want to know if you keep it secure. There are a lot of bugs in there that could do a lot of damage in the wrong hands.”
“You have to have a key to get in here,” Bob assured the man, showing him that the door was locked.
When the two men left, Abigail went out to the cages. Miss Bianca’s cage was empty. Her heart seemed to stop. She had the same queer feeling under her rib cage that she’d felt when Daddy said he was leaving to start a new life in California.
A lot of the cages were empty, Abigail realized, not just Miss Bianca’s. Bob and Dr. Kiel had waited until the weekend so they could steal Miss Bianca and give her a shot full of germs while Abigail wasn’t there to protect her.
Dr. Kiel had given Mother a set of keys when she started working for him. Abigail went back up the stairs to Dr. Kiel’s lab. Mother was working on Dr. Kiel’s expense report from his last trip to Washington. Abigail pretended to study Spanish explorers in the 1500s, sitting so quietly that people came and went, including Bob and the man in the suit, without paying attention to her.
Dr. Kiel was in his lab, talking to Elena as they stood over a microscope. The lab was across the hall; Abigail couldn’t hear what anyone said, but suddenly Dr. Kiel bellowed “Rhonda!” and Mother hurried over with her shorthand notebook.
As soon as she was gone, Abigail went to the drawer where Mother kept her purse. She found the keys and ran back down to the animal room. She didn’t bother about gloves and masks. At any second someone might come in, or Mother would notice her keys were missing.
There were so many keys on the key ring it took five tries before she found the right one. In the contamination room, it didn’t take long to find Miss Bianca: slips of paper with the number of the mouse and the date of the injection were attached to each cage door. 139. Miss Bianca. The poor mouse was huddled in the back of her cage, shivering. Abigail put her in her pocket.
“I’ll get you one of those special pills. You’ll feel better in a jiffy,” Abigail promised her.
When she got back upstairs, Mother and Dr. Kiel were inside his office. He was talking to her in a worried voice. Elena and Bob were in the lab. Abigail got the bottle of pills from the cabinet. The bottle said four a day for ten days for adults, but Miss Bianca was so tiny, maybe one tablet cut into four? Abigail took ten of them and put the bottle away just as Mother came out.
While Mother was preparing dinner, Abigail made a nest for Miss Bianca in a shoe box lined with one of her T-shirts. She took a knife from the drawer in the dining room to poke air holes into the box, then used it to cut the pills into four pieces. They were hard to handle and kept slipping away from the knife. When she finally had them cut up, she couldn’t get Miss Bianca to take one. She just lay in the shoe box, not lifting her head.
“You have to take it or you’ll die,” Abigail told her, but Miss Bianca didn’t seem to care.
Abigail finally pried open the mouse’s little mouth and shoved the piece of pill in. Miss Bianca gave a sharp squeak, but she swallowed the pill.
“That’s a good girl,” Abigail said.
Over dinner, Abigail asked her mother who the man in the suit had been. “He was with Bob in the animal room,” she said. “Is he spying on the animals?”
Rhonda shook her head. “He’s an FBI agent named Mr. Burroughs. Someone sent an anonymous letter telling the FBI to look at Dr. Kiel’s lab.”
“Because Elena is a Communist spy?” Abigail said.
“Don’t say things like that, Abigail. Especially not to Agent Burroughs. Elena is not a spy, and if Dr. Dolan would only—” She bit her lip, not wanting to gossip about Dolan with her daughter.
“Bu
t she did give Dr. Kiel a potion,” Abigail persisted.
“Whatever you saw was none of your business!” Rhonda said. “Clear the table and put the dishes in the machine.”
If Mother was angry, she was less likely to notice what Abigail was doing. While Mother watched It Takes a Thief, Abigail cleaned up the kitchen, then brought a saucer from her doll’s tea set into the kitchen and put some peanut butter in it. Before she went to bed, she stuck some peanut butter onto another piece of the pill and got Miss Bianca to swallow it. When she brushed her teeth, she filled one of her doll’s teacups with water. The mouse didn’t want to drink, so Abigail brought in a wet washcloth and stuck it in Miss Bianca’s mouth.
She quickly shoved the shoe box under her bed when she heard Mother coming down the hall to tuck her in for the night.
Abigail didn’t sleep well. She worried what would happen when Dr. Kiel discovered that Miss Bianca was missing from the lab: she should have taken all the mice, she realized. Then the FBI might think it had been a Communist, stealing their secret mice. What would happen, too, when Mother realized one of Abigail’s T-shirts was missing?
In the morning, she was awake before Mother. She gave Miss Bianca another piece of pill in peanut butter. The mouse was looking better: she took the pill in her little paws and licked the peanut butter from it, then nibbled the tablet. Abigail took her into the bathroom with her and Miss Bianca sipped water from the tap in the sink.
All this was good, but it didn’t stop Abigail feeling sick to her stomach when she thought about how angry Dr. Kiel would be. Mother would lose her job, she would never forgive Abigail. She put the mouse on her shoulder and rubbed her face against its soft fur. “Can you help me, Miss Bianca? Can you summon the Prisoners Aid society now that I’ve saved your life?”
Love & Other Crimes Page 5