Shadow of the Bomb (A Snap Malek Mystery)

by Robert Goldsborough

  "And were you?"

  "No, not in the least. But after two murders, he may have become paranoid."

  Maloney nodded. "All right," he said, leaning back and looking at the ceiling. "There's going to be a press conference this morning at 11th and State announcing the capture. I assume it will be the Commissioner, as well as Chief Fahey. MacAfee will be covering it for us, and as much as I don't like it when reporters themselves become the news, I think he will have to quote you in his story. Do you agree?"

  "I do, sir. I just hope that I'll be mentioned only briefly."

  He frowned. "Unfortunately, I don't see how we can do that. After all, you came very close to being Waggoner's third victim, and that is how he was caught. You'll have to give MacAfee some description as to what it felt like, unpleasant as I know that is. Please don't misinterpret what I'm going to say, as I'm extremely happy that you survived a close call. But in one sense, this has been good for the Tribune. It shows that we are on the front line in big stories, that our reporters are aggressive."

  So that was how it played out. We ran a banner story the next morning, under the headline TRIB REPORTER SURVIVES ATTACK, KILLER NABBED AT U OF C. I was quoted at length by MacAfee, saying that I knew Chester Waggoner slightly from my visits to the University Tavern, but that I had no idea as to why he would want to kill me, other than that I was a reporter who he may have felt suspected him.

  The other papers all played the story big as well, of course, and each of them was forced to run quotes from me, whether they liked it or not.

  The most bizarre aspect was that I ended up giving quotes to the very men I had worked with in the Headquarters press room for years: Masters, Farmer, O'Farrell, and Metz, all of whom ragged me unmercifully, both at the time and later. But I got some measure of revenge on them by giving my most colorful comments to Joanie from City News.

  Chapter 23

  Of course it was not until years later that I understood the full significance of what I had witnessed in the dreary, catacomb-like underbelly of Stagg Field on that historic December day. By then the war was over and I was happily married, living in a comfortable house in Oak Park with a wonderful woman named Catherine, although that is a story for another time.

  The war ended just before the military had a chance to draft Peter, who, after graduation from Lake View High–with honors, I might add–entered the University of Illinois in Champaign, where he now is in graduate school in architecture. All those years of constructing bridges and towers with Erector sets had left their impact on him.

  I never got around to calling Irene Bergman as she had suggested. My attentions had become focused solely on Catherine. But I did read a review in the Trib praising her book about the family in Civil War Maryland. The reviewer said "she shows increasing promise as an author of historical novels. It is to be hoped that she will continue to grow in the genre."

  A couple of other loose ends, both of which are worth mentioning:

  First, Scott, the brother of Joanie, our City News Bureau reporter in the Headquarters press room, survived the Bataan Death March. He was released from Japanese captivity when General MacArthur's troops retook the Philippines late in the war. Last I heard, he had married and was raising a family in one of the western suburbs, Maywood I think, a town which had supplied so many of the troops that fought at Bataan.

  Second, Alvin MacAfee's wife, Flora, had an uneventful delivery and gave birth to a healthy girl, Rose Ellen, who I am proud to call my goddaughter. Al, no longer the shy and respectful young journalist of earlier days, is now the Tribune's City Hall reporter. And in that role, he is something of a bulldog, throwing questions at Mayor Edward J. Kelly that hizzoner would prefer not to answer. I credit this change in Al's personality to his days in the Headquarters press room, where he was forced to spar with the likes of Dirk O'Farrell and Packy Farmer and the redoubtable Anson Masters.

  As for Chester Waggoner, he eventually went to the electric chair, and remained unrepentant to the end. He steadfastly refused a lawyer, insisting that both of the men that he killed had endangered national security and were in effect traitors. "God knows without any doubt that I did the right thing," he said to the priest who visited him in his cell on the last day of his life. "I look forward to telling him all about it when I see him in heaven."

  Fergus Fahey had his moment of glory in the Waggoner case, getting praise from the Mayor for his "unstinting and tireless dedication to duty in this awful episode." I'm sure he was happy about the accolades, but he was even happier that those accolades went to him and not to the FBI.

  Maybe it was my incessant nagging to Maloney, or perhaps it was that he liked the way I handled myself on what I now refer to as the "Hyde Park Affair," but I finally got the opportunity to go to Europe as a correspondent. I worked in the Trib's London bureau during the last year of the war, and covered the election in which Clement Atlee defeated Churchill, which shocked many Americans. I also was at the "Big 3" Potsdam conference of Allies, at which Atlee, Truman, and Stalin discussed the shape postwar Europe would take.

  It was an exciting and eventful year. I loved London, and I promised Catherine we would go there together some day on one of those big liners from New York. But I was happy to come home and return to Police Headquarters, where you will still find me bantering with my like numbers on the city's other newspapers and giving Fergus Fahey packages of cigarettes in return for the superb coffee brewed by the unfailingly cheerful Elsie Dugo.

  Epilogue

  The preceding is a work of fiction, and all of its principal characters, institutions, and events, except those listed below, exist solely in the mind of the author. Also, any episodes in which historical figures interact with fictional ones are strictly products of the author's imagination.

  The 1942 Chicago Bears became only the second team in National Football League history to go through the regular season undefeated (the first being the 1934 Bears). The 1942 Bears, like their '34 counterparts, lost the championship game, falling to the Washington Redskins 14-6. The Bears exacted revenge the next season, however, defeating the Redskins 41-21 in the 1943 title game.

  The Cocoanut Grove Fire in Boston's Bay Village district in November 1942 claimed more than 490 lives, making it the deadliest blaze in U.S. history. The disaster led to a greater emphasis on fire prevention in nightclubs and other public places. Emergency lighting, exit signs, and occupancy capacity signs were widely mandated. Today a hotel occupies the site where the nightclub stood.

  Enrico Fermi was awarded a Nobel Prize in 1938 in physics for his work on nuclear processes. He moved to the United States in '38 and was a professor of physics at Columbia University from 1939 to 1942, when he relocated to Chicago and oversaw the first controlled nuclear chain reaction under the Stagg Field grandstands on Dec. 2, 1942. He subsequently played an important part in the development of the atomic bomb. He became an American citizen in 1944. In 1946, he was appointed a professor at the Institute of Nuclear Studies at the University of Chicago, a position he held until his death in 1954 at the age of 53.

  Robert Maynard Hutchins was named president of the University of Chicago in 1929 at the age of 30. He served in that position until 1945, revamping the school's approach to academics by putting a greater stress on a liberal education rather than specialization. He also advocated the measurement of achievement through comprehensive examinations rather than by classroom time. He decried nonacademic pursuits, including big-time football, which was abandoned by the school in 1939. He served as the university's chancellor from 1945 to 1951, when he became an associate director of the Ford Foundation. He later headed the Fund for the Republic and founded the Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions to study and discuss a wide range of issues. He died in 1977 at the age of 78.

  J. Loy (Pat) Maloney started his Chicago Tribune career in 1917 but soon after enlisted in World War I, where he was an aviator serving with Eddie Rickenbacker. After the war, he worked in a succession of reporting
and editing positions at the Tribune until he became managing editor in 1939 on the death of Bob Lee. He directed the paper's news coverage throughout World War II and into the postwar era, retiring in 1950 for health-related reasons. He died in 1976 at the age of 85.

  The Powhatan, where Steve Malek twice visited the beguiling Irene Bergman, is a modernist apartment tower on Chicago's South Side lakeshore near the University of Chicago campus. Designed by Robert De Golyer, completed in 1929, and designated a Chicago landmark in 1993, the 22-story structure is classic example of what since the 1960s has been termed "Art Deco." Even today, the Native American-themed design has the power to entrance visitors: The building's splendid lobbies, elevators, mosaics and other ornamentation make it one of Chicago's most interesting architectural icons.

  Eddie Rickenbacker made news in both World Wars. He was a flying ace in the first war, shooting down twenty-six German planes in a two-month period. Although he initially opposed American entry into World War II, once the U.S. was in the war he volunteered his services and became a civilian advisor, reporting to Secretary of War Henry Stimson. In that role, he visited military bases all over the world. He was on one such mission in 1942 when his plane, a B17 bomber, went down in the Pacific off New Guinea. He and six others survived at sea on life rafts for twenty-four days before their rescue. After the war, he returned to Eastern Airlines, which he had operated in the 1930s. Under his leadership, it became a major carrier in the 1950s and '60s. He was chief executive of the airline until 1959 and chairman until 1963. He died in July 1973 at the age of 82.

  Stagg Field, the longtime home of the University of Chicago football team, until the school dropped the sport in 1939, was the site of the first self-sustaining controlled nuclear chain reaction. Discerning readers will note that in this story, the author altered the time of the Dec. 2 chain reaction from afternoon, when it occurred, to evening. His defense: "It seemed like it should have happened after dark." The old Gothic-style stadium was razed to make way for the University of Chicago's Regenstein Library, which opened in 1970. The site of the chain reaction is marked by a Henry Miller sculpture, "Nuclear Energy," as well as with plaques commemorating the 1942 scientific breakthrough. A newer and far more modest Stagg Field, northwest of the old stadium's site, has tennis courts and a football field. Decades after dropping out of the Big Ten, the University revived football, although on a far more modest level. The University's NCAA Division III football team now plays such schools as Elmhurst College, Carnegie Mellon University, and Eureka College.

  Amos Alonzo Stagg, for whom both Stagg Fields were named, coached the University of Chicago Maroon football teams for forty-one years, from 1892 to 1933, and five times had undefeated teams. Forced by the school to retire at age 70, Stagg then coached at College of the Pacific from 1933 to 1946. From 1947 to 1952, he assisted his son, Amos Alonzo Stagg Jr., as football coach at Susquehanna University. He died in 1965 at age 102.

  Leo Szilard, a physicist and molecular biologist who worked with Enrico Fermi on the 1942 nuclear chain reaction, was born in Hungary and worked in Germany until 1933, when he fled to Britain to escape Nazi persecution. He did research in nuclear physics at Oxford University before moving to the U.S. in 1938. He joined the University of Chicago's "Met Lab" project in 1942. He later became opposed to the development of both the atomic bomb and the hydrogen bomb, and founded the Council for Abolishing War. In the 1950s, he was a professor of biophysics at the University of Chicago. He died at 66 in 1964.

  Mark Waldron was a longtime desk sergeant at Chicago's Hyde Park police station, which no longer exists. The author, as a City News Bureau reporter at the Hyde Park station in 1959, knew Waldron. Using literary license, he placed the sergeant behind the front counter at Hyde Park several years earlier than actually was the case. Waldron, who never once fired his sidearm in thirty-five years on the force, was injured in 1965 while breaking up a fight between a group of young men. He retired soon after, but not because of his injuries. He learned that one of the youths, who he had almost fired at, was only 17. "If I have to kill a 17-year-old, you can have this job," he told his son. Waldron died at 91 in 2000.

  A Brief Chronology of the Atomic Bomb During World War II

  January 1942–The Metallurgy Laboratory is established at the University of Chicago to consolidate research on a nuclear chain reaction and on plutonium.

  December 2, 1942–Enrico Fermi leads a team of scientists in creating the first controlled nuclear chain reaction under the stands at the University of Chicago's Stagg Field.

  January 1943–Land is purchased near Hanford, Wash., for construction of a plutonium-producing nuclear reactor.

  February 1943–Construction on a uranium separation plant begins at Oak Ridge, Tenn.

  April 1943–The Los Alamos, N.M., National Laboratory opens.

  July 16, 1945–The world's first atomic bomb is detonated in the New Mexico desert. The explosion is equal to 18.6 kilotons of TNT.

  August 6, 1945–An atomic bomb, "Little Boy," is dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, by an American bomber, the Enola Gay. Approximately 70,000 people are killed instantly. By the end of 1945, the death toll reaches 140,000.

  August 9, 1945–Another atomic bomb, "Fat Man," is dropped on the Japanese city of Nagasaki, killing 40,000 instantly. By year's end, another 30,000 are dead. On Aug. 14, the Japanese surrender, ending the combat phase of World War II. The formal surrender takes place on Sept. 2.

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  Allardice, Corbin, and Trapnell, Edward R. The First Reactor. Washington: U.S. Department of Energy, 1982.

  Beyer, Don E. The Manhattan Project: America Makes the First Atomic Bomb. New York: Franklin Watts, 1991.

  Blow, Michael. The History of the Atomic Bomb. New York: American Heritage Publishing Co., 1968.

  Fermi, Laura. Atoms in the Family: My Life with Enrico Fermi. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995.

  Groueff, Stephane. Manhattan Project: The Untold Story of Making the Atomic Bomb. Boston: Little Brown & Co., 1967.

  Lanouette, William with Szilard, Bela. Genius in the Shadows: A Biography of Leo Szilard, the Man Behind the Bomb. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992.

  MacPherson, Malcolm C. Time Bomb. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1986.

  Wendt, Lloyd. Chicago Tribune: The Rise of a Great American Newspaper. Chicago: Rand McNally & Co., 1979.

  Meet the author:

  In his early teens, Robert Goldsborough began reading Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe mysteries. This started when he complained to his mother one summer day that he had "nothing to do." An avid reader of the Wolfe stories, she gave him a magazine serialization, and he became hooked on the adventures of the corpulent Nero and his irreverent sidekick, Archie Goodwin.

  Through his school years and beyond, Goldsborough devoured virtually all of the 70-plus Wolfe mysteries. It was during his tenure with the Chicago Tribune that the paper printed the obituary of Rex Stout. On reading it, his mother lamented that "Now there won't be any more Nero Wolfe stories."

  "There might be one more," Goldsborough mused, and began writing an original Wolfe novel for his mother. As a bound typescript, this story, Murder in E Minor, became a Christmas present to her in 1978. For years, that's all the story was–a typescript. But in the mid-'80s, Goldsborough received permission from the Stout estate to publish "E Minor," which appeared as a Bantam hardcover, then paperback. Six more Wolfe novels followed, to favorable reviews.

  As much as he enjoyed writing these books, Goldsborough longed to create his own characters, which he has done in Three Strikes You're Dead, set in the gang-ridden Chicago of the late 1930s and narrated by a Tribune police reporter.

  Goldsborough, a lifelong Chicagoan who has logged 45 years as a writer and editor with the Tribune and with marketing journal Advertising Age, says it was "Probably inevitable that I would end up using a newspaperman as my protagonist."

  www.robertgoldsborough.com

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