Bones of Betrayal bf-4

by Jefferson Bass

  During the Q&A session at the end of the talk, Townes asked about Dr. Novak’s death, since the story — including the wild speculation about the “polonium” that had supposedly killed him — had been splashed all over the media. “I can’t really talk about that case,” I said, “since it’s still an open investigation. All I’ll say is that I’m saving a lot on my light bill these days, since I now glow in the dark.” The joke drew a few groans but a fair number of laughs.

  As I was packing up my slide projector afterward, an elderly man who’d been sitting near the front of the room approached. “I worked in Oak Ridge during the war,” he said. I was surprised; he had some years on him, but he looked strong and vigorous still.

  “Didn’t they have child-labor laws back then? You don’t look old enough to have worked in Oak Ridge during the war.”

  He ignored the transparent flattery. “I was in charge of security,” he said, and my head snapped up. Funny: you see a ninety-year-old at a Rotary Club luncheon, you tend to see him just as some old codger with a lot of hours to fill. You don’t tend to look at him and think, I bet this guy once helped guard atomic secrets at the world’s biggest military project. I didn’t say that, of course; I just said, “That was a big job. Must have been tough.”

  He shook his head. “Sure beat the hell out of dying on some Jap-infested island in the Pacific,” he said. “I knew I’d live to see the end of the war. And we were working on something that was supposed to help end the war, so I figured I was probably in the best-defended place on earth. I felt like a lucky guy.” I nodded.

  “Did you know what you were protecting?”

  He shrugged. “We didn’t talk about it,” he said. “One of the MPs did, and a day later he was gone, just like that.” He snapped his fingers. “They sent him to the Pacific. They didn’t dare send him to Europe, because they didn’t want to take a chance that the Germans would capture him and get some information out of him. Poor bastard was probably dead three months later.” He hesitated, studying me closely, as if to determine whether I was trustworthy. “By the summer of ’45, I had a pretty good idea what they were building. But I kept my mouth shut, because I wanted to stay right here.”

  We chatted a bit more, then he excused himself. Townes, who’d been talking to several power-suited women, came over to carry my slide carousel to the truck. I said, “Do you know that guy I was talking to? He was in charge of security in Oak Ridge back during the war.”

  She smiled. “You might say I know him,” she said. “That’s Bill Sergeant. He spent twelve years spearheading Rotary International’s global campaign to eradicate polio. There’s a statue of Bill downtown in Krutch Park.”

  On the way back to campus, I detoured through downtown and parked — briefly — in front of a fire hydrant beside Krutch Park. Seated in the southwest corner, a strong-limbed child perched on his lap, was a life-size bronze statue of a lucky, modest old codger.

  CHAPTER 13

  Three days after the morgue disaster, Dr. Sorensen had data from dozens of blood samples and urine samples, which he’d gathered to track lymphocyte levels and DNA damage in our cells. That data, combined with the incident timelines we’d compiled, helped him refine his initial estimate of our exposures. He’d been surprisingly close that evening in the ER: Emert had gotten “only” 18 to 24 rads; Miranda and I, 25 to 35 rads; and Garcia, 380 to 520 rads. The lymphocyte counts for everyone but Garcia had dropped only slightly, remaining well within the range considered normal. Garcia’s lymphocytes, however, had plummeted: at his first blood draw, his lymphocyte count was a robust 2,950, a number that corresponded to the nearly three billion white cells in every liter of his blood. Twenty-four hours later, it had fallen to 1100, and at the forty-eight-hour blood sample, it was hovering at 600. His bone marrow was dying, and his immune system was shutting down. According to Sorensen, Garcia was almost certain to develop acute radiation syndrome, probably a severe case. The unspoken subtext of “severe” was that he might not survive.

  Garcia had been shifted to a reverse-isolation room — a “bubble” room, I’d heard it called — as even minor infections could prove fatal to him. The air was filtered and the room was pressurized so outside air couldn’t seep in. Still, Miranda and I made it a point to visit the hospital once or twice a day, waving to him through the glass window and talking to him on the intercom. The second morning of his ICU stay, we entered the unit and came upon Carmen Garcia, slumped in a chair in the hallway, her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. Miranda sat on one side of Carmen, I sat on the other, and we wrapped our arms around her as she wept. When her sobs finally stopped, she reached up and laid one hand briefly on Miranda’s cheek, the other on my cheek, and then she rose and walked toward the elevators. None of us had said a word. After she was gone, Miranda and I went to Eddie’s window. Switching on the intercom microphone and then kneeling down on the concrete floor, we put sock puppets on our hands and enacted a three-minute Punch-and-Judy routine, one that spoofed ourselves arguing in the bone lab about whether a mystery bone was from a human or a blowfly. Miranda’s sock puppet was a caricature of me, and mine was a red-haired sock version of Miranda. She dropped her voice half an octave and did her best impression of a pompous but clueless professor, while I affected a falsetto and sang the praises of Google and Wikipedia and left-wing liberalism. After it was done, and Garcia had called “bravo!” and pretended to applaud with his bandaged hands, and told us what attentive care he was receiving, we said goodbye. In the hallway, Miranda sank into a chair — the same chair we’d found Carmen in — and wept on my shoulder.

  * * *

  Emert and Thornton had both interviewed Novak’s former wife, the woman I’d met at the funeral, and both had come away empty-handed, they reported in a three-way teleconference. Emert was of the opinion that she had Alzheimer’s disease—“She kept asking me who I was,” he said, “and then talking to me like I was her son, saying ‘Mommy this’ and ‘Mommy that.’ She said she’d never heard of anybody named Leonard Novak.” Thornton hadn’t fared much better; she’d told him she used to know someone named Lenny, but she couldn’t quite remember where or when or how.

  “I don’t get it,” I said. “That woman was sharp as a tack when I talked to her at Novak’s funeral. She was lucid, she was irreverent, she was funny. She even noticed that I got spooked for a second, when I thought I saw Jess. A woman I lost.”

  “I think maybe the old gal’s sweet on you,” said Emert.

  “I think maybe Emert’s right,” said Thornton. “And I think maybe you should see if you can get more out of her than we did. Find out what she knows about Novak, and who might have killed him, and why.”

  “And what ‘I know your secret’ meant,” added Emert.

  And so it was, after that conversation and a call to the phone number Beatrice had scrawled on the funeral program, that I found myself winding up Black Oak Ridge in search of her house.

  I passed the house twice before I found it. It was set back off the street and down a slight slope, tucked amid hemlock trees and rhododendron bushes. It was a low, flat-roofed house with wide, overhanging eaves; judging by the clean lines, the ample windows, and the warm redwood siding, I guessed that it dated from the 1960s. It reminded me of the houses designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, who was famous for blending houses into their natural settings.

  Stepping beneath them onto the flagstones bordering the front wall, I felt myself entering a zone of shelter, of sanctuary. The door — a large red slab flanked by narrow sidelights and shielded by a glass storm door — nestled within the corner of an L, and the roofline angled across the corner, creating a triangular porch at the entryway. The walkway and porch were bordered by low irregular terraces of river rock and creeping juniper. A small, artificial stream tumbled down the rocks and into a pool at the doorway. To reach the door, I crossed a huge flagstone — it must have weighed a thousand pounds or more — that bridged the pool. Now this, I thought, this is an entrance.<
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  Beside the door, suspended from a curlicue bracket of wrought iron, hung a bell with a leather cord dangling from its clapper. I gave the cord a tentative tug, and the clapper swung gently, barely tapping the bell. I gave a stronger pull, and the clapper struck with a pure, high ring, the sort of ethereal chime you might hear wafting down from some Tibetan monastery high in the Himalayas. I waited a moment, listening for footsteps, but heard none. She’s eighty-five years old, I reminded myself, give her a minute. Still no one came, so I rapped more loudly on one of the sidelights. Still no footsteps. Feeling slightly furtive, I tried the handle on the glass storm door. It was unlocked, as was the red wooden door. I eased it open just far enough to lean my head inside and called out, “Hello? Mrs. Novak?”

  “Yes?” The voice had a slight quaver to it.

  “It’s Dr. Brockton. We spoke on the phone.”

  “I know we did. I might be ancient, but I’m not senile.”

  I smiled. Yes, she was sharp all right. “Should I come in?”

  “Unless you’d rather stay outside and shout,” she said, sounding simultaneously amused and exasperated, crusty and playful. “Follow my voice.” I stepped inside and found myself in a low-ceilinged foyer, its walls paneled with the same warm redwood as the home’s exterior. The floor was terrazzo, a glassy-smooth mosaic of marble chips set into concrete and polished to a soft lustre of green, red, black, and ivory. “I was beginning to think maybe you’d stood me up.”

  Her voice, together with a broad track of reflected daylight, led me to a wide doorway. When I stepped through it, the space opened up dramatically, and I blinked from both the brightness and the unexpectedness of it. “Oh my,” I heard myself saying, “this is wonderful.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I designed it to be wonderful. Back when wonderful was still a possibility.”

  It took me a moment to find her, just as it had taken some effort to find her house. She was sitting in a high, wing-backed chair that nearly enveloped her; the chair was off to one side of a large living room, facing a wall of glass that looked out into the woods behind the house. The polished floor extended seamlessly beyond the glass and onto a large terrace; the terrace was partly sheltered beneath a high, wide roof overhang; the overhang was made of the same tongue-and-groove redwood as the walls and eaves of the house. Together, the architectural elements and their blurred transitions — the seamless floor, the wall of glass, and the unbroken planes of redwood — conspired to hide the boundary between indoors and out, and if not for the warmth in the sun-drenched room, I’d have been hard pressed to say whether the space was enclosed or not.

  “Looks like wonderful is still possible,” I said, walking to the side of her chair, “at least in here. It’s Dr. Brockton, Mrs. Novak. Thank you for letting me come see you.”

  “Letting you? I practically twisted your arm out of the socket. Do you have any idea how seldom I have company? Almost everyone I used to know is dead or dying. It’s depressing as hell. By the way, I haven’t been Mrs. Novak in sixty years. Novak was three husbands ago. It’s Montgomery now, and Mr. Montgomery kicked the bucket quite a while back. So call me Beatrice, unless you want to remind me I’m old and make me cranky.”

  “I’d hate to make you cranky, Beatrice,” I said.

  “It wouldn’t be in your best interest,” she agreed. “Sit down, and tell me what it is you want to know. The tea should still be hot — I made it about five minutes ago.” A large mug sat on a table between the two chairs, and wisps of steam wafting up from it caught the slanting afternoon light. Beside the mug was a small china plate that held two round, golden cookies. “The cookies are Scottish shortbread,” she said. “Butter and flour and sugar. If you don’t want them, throw them out for the birds, because I’m not supposed to have them.”

  I headed to the rocker but stopped before sitting down. “You’re not having any tea? Can I get you anything else — some water, maybe?”

  “Water? Never touch the damn stuff,” she said. “I’ll have some vodka when it’s cocktail hour.”

  “When’s that?”

  “Five,” she said. “What time is it now?”

  I glanced at my watch; I was about to tell her it was three forty-five when the note of teasing and hopefulness in her voice registered with me. “This watch is not worth a damn,” I fibbed. “It eats a battery once a week.”

  She laughed. “Dear me, you are a smooth one,” she said. “Too bad I’m not forty years younger. I’d make you fall desperately in love with me. You’re an interesting fellow, Dr. Brockton.”

  “Call me Bill,” I said, “unless you want to make me cranky.”

  She smiled, then tilted her face toward the window and closed her eyes; the low sun highlighted the wrinkles left by decades of laughter and pain, but underneath I could discern the planes of a younger woman’s face. “That sun looks like a five-o’clock sun to me,” she said. “Close enough, anyway. The vodka’s on the bookshelf behind you. Pour me two fingers’ worth, would you, Bill? There’s ice in the ice bucket. Join me if you like.”

  “I’d better not,” I said. “I can tell I need to keep my wits about me when I’m with you.” I didn’t see any point in telling her that I didn’t drink alcohol; she might think I disapproved of drinking, and that wasn’t the case. Rather, having spent years battling Menier’s disease, I tended to steer clear of anything that had the remotest chance of making me dizzy.

  A crystal decanter, silver ice bucket, tongs, and two tumblers sat on a silver tray on a waist-high counter running the length of the back wall. Below the counter were cabinets; above it were bookshelves containing hundreds of volumes, ranging from small paperbacks to large leatherbound volumes. I wondered if she’d read them all. I put a few ice cubes into a tumbler, then poured the vodka from the decanter, catching a whiff of orange in the liquor. Did “two fingers” mean with or without the ice, I wondered, but I hated to betray my ignorance by asking. Without, I decided, and kept pouring, since the ice alone filled at least one finger’s worth of space.

  One end of the counter held a cluster of framed photographs, and as I delivered the vodka, I detoured past the pictures. A half dozen or so in number, they were all in black-and-white, and I guessed by the clothing and hairstyles that they were from the 1940s. Suddenly I recognized one of the photos: I had seen it in the museum and the library the day of Novak’s funeral. It showed a striking young woman perched at a console of dials and levers, and in the five seconds it took me to walk back to the chairs with Beatrice’s drink, I realized that the pretty girl in the photo had the same cheekbones and jawline as the old woman facing the fading light. “That’s you in the picture,” I said.

  “Not anymore,” she said. “That was a lifetime ago. But back during the war, I was the calutron poster girl.”

  “What’s a calutron?”

  “A California University cyclotron,” she said. “Invented by Ernest Lawrence, the Nobel laureate physicist from Berkeley. We used them at Y-12 to separate uranium-235 for the bomb. We weren’t told that’s what we were doing, of course. The foreman just told us to watch the gauges and twist the dials to keep the needles centered. So I watched and I twisted. And atom by atom, I was separating the isotopic wheat from the chaff, you might say. I was a winnower, Bill, on the threshing floor of the atomic barn.”

  I held out the tumbler to her, and I noticed a slight tremor in the hand that took it. The sunlight caught the ice cubes and made them glow, like golden, living things. Beatrice’s skin was translucent in the sunlight; through it, I could see the spiderwork of thin purple veins, and — underneath — the withering strings of muscle and tendon. I almost thought I could see bone, too, but perhaps I was imagining it. She drew a deep breath, blew it out, and then took a sip of vodka. “I was a beauty once,” she said, pointing with her glass toward the photograph. She didn’t say it boastfully; it was a statement of fact, with a layer of nostalgia underneath. “As I said, that was a lifetime ago. I’m not that girl anymore. But oh, the
stories I could tell you about her.”

  “Tell me one,” I said, settling into the rocker. “Tell me the story of how she met and married Leonard Novak.”

  With that, she began to speak, and her words began to weave a spell.

  CHAPTER 14

  Once upon a time, Bill, Oak Ridge blazed with brilliance and vitality, and Leonard Novak and I burned at the heart of the flame.

  It wasn’t just the work; in fact, for most of us, the work was the dull, dreary part; the hours were long and the work was backbreaking or mind-numbing. It seems exciting and glamorous now, but back then, only a handful of people knew our place in the grand scheme of things. The top military leaders, like General Groves and Colonel Nichols, saw the big picture; so did the senior scientists, like Oppenheimer and Fermi and Lawrence, although those three never lived here; they just descended on Oak Ridge now and again, like visiting heads of state. Of the hundreds of scientists in Oak Ridge, Novak was one of the very few who grasped what this vast, desperate endeavor was all about.

  The other eighty thousand of us were grunts; we saw only our own tiny little speck of work, and we had no idea what it meant. So I spent eight hours a day, six days a week, staring at needles and twisting knobs. Other people spent fifty or sixty hours a week pouring concrete or bulldozing mud or fitting pipe or welding. When we weren’t working, we spent a lot of time standing in lines. Lines to clock in, lines to clock out. Lines to buy groceries — groceries that sometimes ran out before the line did. Lines to buy cigarettes. People would see a line and queue up, sometimes not even knowing what the line was for, because if other people were in line, there must be something worth lining up for. It was like something out of a Charlie Chaplin film, the one where Chaplin is reduced to a human cog in a huge assembly line.