by Peter Rabe
Jones shrugged. “Before we leave, please show us the scene of the theft once again, Dr. Tiffin.” He held the door open.
They walked through the central hall of the building and turned into a corridor. It was long and bare.
“There is not much to see,” said Tiffin. “Our atomic pile is small, extending from about here to here.” He paced off close to forty feet in the corridor and pointed to one blank wall. “The room housing the device is completely shielded. Follow me, please.”
They turned the corner of the corridor and Tiffin opened a door. A wooden sign stood next to it, face to the wall. Herron turned it around and read, “Danger. Radioactivity.”
“It’s quite safe now. The sign was only put there after the leak was discovered. Ordinarily this room is not exposed. Follow me, please.”
The small room held racks and a trapdoor in one wall. There was moisture on the floor.
“This wall,” Tiffin said, “shields the business end of the pile from the storage room in which we stand. The wall is actually a series of large canisters filled with water. Sometime during the day previous to the theft, this drainpipe—you can see it near the floor—seems to have leaked water out of the lower series of tanks.”
“And there was nothing in this room except the gold ingot?”
“Nothing else. That’s why we cannot say for how much time, if any, the gold was subject to bombardment.”
“So it may not be radioactive at all.”
“Possibly. Or it may be only partially radioactive.”
“How do you mean, partially?” Herron wanted to know.
“Only a part of its mass, let’s say a fraction of an inch on the surface, may have become radioactive. Which would be a blessing,” Tiffin added. “That is, if you can find it at all.”
“We’ll find what’s left of it,” Jones said.
“Left of it? What are you talking about, Chief?” Herron asked.
“Irradiated gold,” Tiffin said, and he sounded indulgent, “has a half-life of one day. That means that after a day has passed, its radioactivity has reduced itself by half; the following day there is again a reduction to half of what was left, and so on. What remains, young man, is not gold. What remains is pure stable mercury.”
“You mean nothing may be left to that stuff except quicksilver?”
“Hardly, Mr. Herron. That kind of total deterioration of a large ingot would require more energy than our pile can muster. And besides, the thief wouldn’t have left here alive.”
“That’s good to know,” said Herron. “So we’re still looking for gold.”
“Considering our source of radiation and the possible length of time the ingot may have been exposed, the affected part of the gold would be quite small, but nonetheless dangerous. Of course, once the radiation has dissipated itself, the body of the ingot is again quite harmless. Pure gold, with traces of mercury.”
They left the storage room and went back to Tiffin’s office.
“Will there be anything else?” Tiffin stopped by the door.
“Just your report, Dr. Tiffin. We must know how sick the thief may be, and how dangerous the ingot may be to the population.”
“Mr. Jones, our guess as to how long the gold was exposed may not help you as much as you think. Nonlethal doses of radiation may cause a variety of symptoms, and they may appear to be harmless things.”
“What are they?” Jones asked.
“In general, the first signs are weariness, headache, digestive upset. The mucosa of the digestive tract seems particularly sensitive to radiation. Sometimes skin irritations occur, like a sunburn. In severe cases skin ulcerations develop or simple sores that refuse to heal. The most specific effect, of course, is the destruction of bone marrow with consequent blood deterioration. After that, any infection becomes a serious matter. But I’m sure you knew all this.”
“That much we knew, Dr. Tiffin. In the meantime, please hurry with your report.”
“I don’t see how a mere guess—”
“An intelligent guess, Dr. Tiffin. Good day, sir.”
Herron thought Jones had done that very well. He followed his chief down the long corridor and out into the open. The sun was shining and some new flowerbeds made a good smell in the air. Herron was glad to be out of the building. There hadn’t been any windows in the place.
They walked across the campus to the parking lot while Herron kept thinking about the things Tiffin had said.
“Has anybody answered our alarm yet, Chief?”
“Hundreds of hypochondriacs.”
“At least we’ll have our man worried.”
“Not necessarily, Herron. If he’s got half a brain, he’ll keep from exposing himself after hearing our alarm, and any mild symptoms he might get he’d be apt to overlook at first.”
“Till it gets worse.”
“It might, Herron. A few repeated exposures, each one of them small, and the effect will grow. At any rate, what have you found out in the meantime?”
Herron pulled a notebook out of his breast pocket and began to recite.
“Besides the Hamilton City case of radiation, no further reports, and they’re not sure it is radiation burn. Three of our sources report heavy spending by two of the suspects, Ham Lippin and Jerald Jenner. Ham is in Miami Beach and Jerry is in San Diego. I also got that list of parolees you asked for. It narrows down to seven: the two Corvetti brothers, Sam Nutchin, Gus Eisenberg, Tony Catell, Carl Lamotte, and Mug McFarlane. Three of them aren’t very likely, considering everything. Sam Nutchin is very sick, Tony Catell is a has-been without connections, and one of the Corvettis is drunk most of the time. So that leaves us with the younger Corvetti, Eisenberg, Lamotte, and McFarlane.”
“That leaves us with a lot of nothing.”
“Sorry, Chief, that’s as far as I could get, so far.”
They walked in silence till they came to the parking lot behind the library.
“Have the two watchmen come up with anything else?” Jones asked.
“Same story. Somebody slugged them from behind. They don’t know whether there was one or more assailants.”
“How are they getting along?”
“No change. Bad concussions.”
“Any new evidence that the lab boys dug up?”
“They find evidence of one person only.”
Jones and Herron got into the car. Jones took the wheel.
“Seems like quite an order for one man,” Herron said. “Two watchmen slugged, three doors jimmied, two electric-eye circuits ruined, one vault door blown, not to speak of the missing gold.”
“What might help us is the fact that the loot could be radioactive. I hate to think of it, Jack, but that might make it more convenient for us to track it down.”
“It hasn’t so far, Chief.”
“I know. But a thirty-six-pound block of radioactive gold is going to make somebody sick.”
“Yeah. Especially since the thief probably didn’t know the stuff could be radioactive. If he’d known, he wouldn’t have kept the stuff in the same room with him when he holed up in that crummy rooming house in Hamilton City.”
“That may not mean a thing. Don’t forget, we still haven’t a trace of the thief or the gold, which probably means he hasn’t slowed down any himself.”
The drive from Kelvin University back to St. Louis took them one hour, but at the end of that time, neither Jones nor Herron had come up with any new ideas. When the trip was over and they pulled into the underground garage of headquarters, they were glad to get out of the car. Herron looked rumpled and tired, but Jones appeared as bland and neat as ever.
“Who knows, perhaps we’ll have a break when we get to the office, eh, Chief?”
Jones smiled back for a moment, but didn’t answer. They took the elevator to their floor and entered the bureau.
“Come to my office, will you, Jack? I want you to look at the follow-ups I got on some of the possible brains behind this job. Right now we’re going on the
assumption that this was not a syndicate job.”
“Why?”
“Lots of reasons. For instance, they would have used more than one man at the scene. I’ll show you the analysis later. Now, as I was saying, that narrows the field quite a bit. There aren’t too many independents left.”
Herron opened the door for Jones and they walked into the Chief’s office.
“All right, Jack. Here’s a dossier on Charles Letterman, alias Chauncey Lettre, alias Professor Letters. Sixty-five years old, convicted twice for complicity in bank robberies. Light sentence each time. One conviction for illegal possession of stolen goods. He’s suspected of planning a long list of crimes. Take a look at it. Present address, Two-o-seven Desbrosses Street, New York City. Next, there’s one Otto Schumacher, sixty-eight, no aliases. A very careful planner. When you look at the list, you’ll find he’s supposedly been behind a lot of inside jobs, but don’t let that prejudice you. Otherwise, little is known about him except that he was probably behind some of the biggest heists during the twenties. And he’s never been convicted of anything. Take the file along, Jack, and hold it, because we haven’t found him yet.”
The phone rang. Jones picked it up and said, “Jones.” He listened for a while, then said, “Good. Thanks.” He put the receiver down and told Herron not to bother with the other dossiers. “Just read the one on Otto Schumacher. They found him. It seems he spent last month in Kelvin, presumably to use the university library. He roomed at the same house as one of the night watchmen of the Research Center, and they often played checkers together. At present he lives in Detroit, where the local office has him staked out. They’re going to pull him in tomorrow, and I want you to be there. We have little to go on with Schumacher except that his cleaning woman showed up at the county clinic today. Complaint, headache and diarrhea, plus a possible radiation burn of the sole of one foot. Could be a coincidence, though. He’s your case, Jack, but remember, he’s never been convicted. Good luck.”
“Good luck, Otto. I think I found a contact out West who’ll take the stuff.”
“Tony, for God’s sake, where have you been.” Schumacher yelled into the phone. His hands were shaking. “Do you realize that damn thing is still in this apartment? Have you any idea what a time I had trying to keep from going nuts waiting for you? Either you come at once or I’ll get somebody else to take it out of here. Tony, are you listening?!”
There was a short silence at the other end of the wire and then Catell’s voice, very quiet: “Don’t do it, Otto. I’m warning you.”
“All right, all right. Are you coming?”
“I’ll be there, Otto. Have you moved it any?”
“Are you insane? I haven’t—”
“Don’t blubber, Otto You could have done something to shield it. I heard lead—”
“For God’s sake, Tony, get over here and don’t lecture me. I haven’t been able to think straight with that thing under the floor!”
“I’ll be over, Otto. I got a lead apron from a guy, like they wear when they take X rays. We’ll wrap it in that. I’ll be there this afternoon.”
Schumacher sighed with relief and wiped his forehead. “Thank God. Make it soon, Tony. I’ll be waiting. Ah, Tony…are you in town, Tony?”
“Yeah. Why?”
“Nothing Just make it soon. And Tony—”
“Yeah, what is it?”
“Ah, everything O.K. with you?”
“Sure, sure. See you later, Otto.”
“Tony, is Selma all right? Tony?”
But the line was dead. Schumacher put down the receiver and walked to the window. Four stories down he saw three kids playing with a ball. Two of them were tossing the ball back and forth and the third kid was trying to catch it away from them. Then a man walked up and caught the ball out of the air. He put it in his pocket and turned down the street, the three kids running after him.
Schumacher left the window and wiped his forehead again. He went to the kitchen to get a drink of water, then changed his mind. Schumacher felt sickish and sticky.
There were three rooms in the apartment and Schumacher kept pacing back and forth from the living room to the bedroom, from the bedroom to the living room. The third room was closed and Schumacher didn’t go near it. Nobody had been in the room since Catell had come back, except for the cleaning woman. Schumacher had found her standing near the bookshelf, dusting and humming a tune. He argued with her from the doorway to come out and leave his books alone. He screamed at her and she screamed back, but she didn’t move from her spot till she finished dusting the books. Right under her feet, under the flooring, lay the radioactive gold.
Schumacher remembered the incident and looked at the closed door. The thought of that silent yellow thing, radiating death with no noise, no odor, no natural signs at all, made him feel clammy. “I’m cracking,” he mumbled. “I’ve got to hold on, for God’s sake.”
He went to the bathroom and turned on the cold water. When he leaned over to wash his face, his vision blurred and he lost his balance. Schumacher grabbed the washbowl with both hands, but his head slammed into the cabinet over the basin. The sudden pain cleared his head and he felt better. Straightening he inhaled deeply, but his eyes refused to focus. He doubled over, a sharp cramp twisting his insides, and retched. He retched till he thought his head would split with the pressure. When it was over, Schumacher staggered from the bathroom, found the front window, and pulled it open. He leaned over the windowsill and took greedy breaths of the fresh, cool air. After a while his strength came back, and with it the horror of the knowledge that he was sick. Not just sick like anyone else, but sick with the hard live rays from the radioactive gold. His mouth shook.
When his head cleared, Schumacher looked up and down the street. He saw nobody. What happened to the kids with the ball? What happened to those people who usually stood on house steps, walked down streets, loitered at corners? But there were people loitering at the corner. There were two men at each corner.
Seized with a sudden hunger, Schumacher went to the kitchen and ate a plate of cold stew, some dry bread, and a few spoons of peanut butter. Then he went back to the living room and lit himself a cigar. The window was still open. Now there were three men at one corner and none at the other. A closed truck had pulled up to the curb near the fireplug next to the corner. And there were two men walking toward the house where Schumacher had his apartment. One was smoking a cigarette, the other was carrying a small, square satchel.
“What time is it?” The one with the cigarette sounded nervous.
“Five to three.”
“They should be at the back now, you think?”
“Give them another few minutes.”
They started down the street slowly. The one with the satchel opened the top of the leather case and flicked the switch for a dial that showed through the opening. Immediately the box began a faint and intermittent crackling.
“Turn that damn thing down, man. You wanna arouse the whole block?”
“Take it easy. You can hardly hear it. What’s the matter with your nerves, anyway?”
“Nothing. There’s nothing wrong with my nerves.”
“You scared of this Schumacher, maybe? He’s over sixty, you know. Here, have another cigarette.”
“Thanks “
“Well? Go ahead and smoke it.”
“For chrissakes, stop picking on me. In case you and that damn box there haven’t heard, Schumacher’s got a reputation that goes back to when you were tripping over your diapers. And turn that crazy ticker off, or whatever it is.”
“Can’t do that, Harry It’s science. And science never—”
“Aw, shut up!”
They walked without talking for a while. Only the traffic at the ends of the street made a noise, and the box they had along. Every so often it ticked and crackled.
“Why’s that damn thing ticking all the time? Is everything radioactive, for chrissakes?”
“This is nothing. You should hea
r it tick when there’s hot stuff around. But I guess you won’t hear it perform today. Schumacher would be crazy to keep that gold around. What time now?”
“Three sharp.”
“O.K., let’s go.”
“Wait!”
At the end of the street where the closed truck was parked a man had appeared and seemed about to enter the short street. The driver of the truck climbed out of his cab and started toward the man. The stranger stopped, bent toward the wall of a building, and lit a cigarette. Then he continued past the street and disappeared.
“Thank God,” said the man with the Geiger counter. “For a minute I thought that guy in the blue coat was coming this way. All right, let’s go. We stay in the hall for ten minutes while the guys from the back go upstairs and check the corridors. Then Herron joins us and we go up.”
“I just hope that guy in the blue coat doesn’t decide to come back.”
Tony Catell had spent his life trying to avoid trouble, and he had developed a sharp nose for it. When he turned into Schumacher’s street something brought him up short. There weren’t enough people. It was too quiet. Two guys down the block were walking too slowly.
Cops.
Catell controlled a panicky urge to run and took a step toward the wall of the nearest building. He lit a cigarette. Looking over his cupped hands, he saw a man climb out of a truck, turn toward him, and stop. The guy wasn’t sure, but he was watching. Who did they want? Schumacher? Himself? Suddenly a strong hot hate boiled up inside him, killing his doubt, his fear, his short moment of hesitation. Nothing was going to get in his way, nothing! Catell didn’t wonder how they had found Schumacher, whether they knew the gold was there, or whether they knew about him. He didn’t even stop to figure what to do, or how, or when. Catell turned into a thing possessed with one thought only: Get that gold!
He had lit a cigarette to make his stop at the corner seem natural. He walked on so they wouldn’t bother to look at him. And then he saw the delivery car. It was parked in the driveway a few yards ahead, and on the side of the car was lettered “TV Repair.” The driver was opening the door in the rear.
It took Catell a few quick steps to get behind the man at the truck and less than a second to jab his hand, stiff fingered, into the driver’s right kidney. The man didn’t scream. He exhaled with a rattle in his throat and started to sag. Catell jerked the rear door open, tossed the man in, and jumped after him. Without bothering to close the door, he smashed his fist into the groaning face and the man went limp. Catell took off his hat and coat, ripped the jacket and cap off the unconscious driver, and put them on. Then he jumped out the back. Whistling a tune, he slammed the back door shut, jumped in the driver’s seat, and drove back to the corner that he had just left.