A Fierce Radiance

by Lauren Belfer

  Hanover—that put Claire into an awkward position. There was no reason why Mr. Luce would know that Edward Rutherford had bought the company (which was privately held rather than publicly traded), or that Rutherford was her father. Well, it didn’t matter: she was withdrawing from this assignment.

  “Mr. Luce, I have my son to protect. And myself, frankly, on my son’s behalf. I’m less interested in this assignment than I was. I want you to take me off it.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous. The answer is no. Too much at stake. You’re the best one for the job.”

  “I’m no longer—”

  “Mrs. Shipley,” he interrupted, “here’s what I tell staff traveling to the South, uncovering the truth about Jim Crow. Anyone tries to interfere with you, anyone tries to scare you, you remember this: you are a representative of Life magazine. Of Time, Incorporated. You are a representative of me.”

  On the all-important me, he turned and walked down the hall toward his office without saying good-bye. Claire was left staring at a large notice on the wall announcing that in the event of a bombing raid, this floor was to be evacuated immediately.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Fifteen minutes before midnight, Claire and Tony finally found a parking spot in the crowded lot of Hanover & Company. Crucial war industries were staffed twenty-four hours a day, in three shifts. Judging from the packed lot, the workers here weren’t affected by gasoline rationing; or maybe the area lacked public transportation so the workers had no choice but to drive.

  Tony and Claire sat in the car and studied the building. The reception area on the main floor was brightly lit, as were the long laboratory wings on each side. The windows, situated high on each floor, offered only a glimpse of the ceilings. Presumably, suburban New Jersey didn’t have blackout regulations.

  “There’s probably a security guy at the front desk, don’t you think?” Tony said.

  “Must be.”

  “Sort of guy who’d call his boss if we just turned up there.”

  “No doubt.”

  The night was warm, with a fresh breeze sweetened by the scents of thick grass and billowing trees. Bats swept through the starlit sky. Charlie was in Hershey, Pennsylvania, with his grandfather for the chocolate convention, so it was a perfect night for Claire to be on assignment.

  “What do we do now?” Tony said.

  “Let’s sit for a minute and see if we get any ideas.”

  Claire hoped she’d made the right choice in coming here. She couldn’t refuse Mr. Luce’s direct instructions. In retrospect, John Smith’s warning seemed overblown. As to her father, he’d told her that he didn’t manage the day-to-day affairs of the company. She neither hurt him nor helped him by being here.

  “Maybe at midnight there’ll be a shift change, and we can slip in during the general confusion. Worst case, we’ll go to the guard. Probably he wouldn’t want to wake up his boss in the middle of the night to deal with the likes of us.”

  “Yeah, that sounds right,” Tony said.

  Claire felt herself drifting in the warm summer night, unable to take on the role of leader.

  Tony slouched against the seat. “You think there are bears roaming around here at night? Mountain lions?”

  “It’s possible. In fact, I think I’ve heard that there are.”

  He stiffened, city boy that he was.

  “In the woods. These aren’t real woods.” At least she didn’t believe this was a real forest. Dark figures moved at the edges of the trees, crouching along the ground. Raccoons, most likely. Lightning bugs burst like sparkles through the air. Had Jamie spent time here at night? Had he watched the play of the lightning bugs? In her next letter, she’d ask him. The sound of the crickets became too loud for comfort.

  “Think we can risk listening to the radio?” Tony asked.

  “Keep it low.”

  He turned to WNEW, the big band station. Claire imagined herself at the Rainbow Room in an evening gown, dancing with Jamie in black tie, the revolving dance floor taking them round and round as they moved to the music of Benny Goodman and Artie Shaw, the lights of the city bright outside the windows. He held her tightly, and she pressed her face against his shoulder.

  At midnight, the news came on. The Eastern Front was a thousand miles of Russian defeats. The RAF’s nightly bombing raids on German cities continued with a firestorm in Düsseldorf that left thousands dead. Good news: thousands dead. Claire imagined the German equivalent of herself and Charlie among the survivors, struggling to endure in the bombed-out city. She couldn’t help but imagine a firestorm in New York City, she and Tony watching the red conflagration on the horizon.

  Last week Bill Shipley had gone out on an RAF bombing raid and written about it in the Tribune. Of the squadron he went with, only three planes came back. The article had disturbed her. If Bill were killed, how would she tell Charlie? Bill was famous enough now that if he were on a plane that didn’t come back, his death would warrant a front-page article in his newspaper. The death would be public, part of the war effort. He’d be written about as a hero.

  “Hey, get a load of that guy.” Tony motioned with his chin.

  At the end of the laboratory wing closest to them, a man had exited from the fire door and was lighting a pipe. He was no more than a silhouette against the darkness until his match flashed orange. Government posters on the subway reminded people that during a blackout the lighting of a match could give away your position to the enemy. Here in the midst of the New Jersey forests and pastures, with blackout regulations apparently nonexistent or unenforced, the man had certainly advertised his position to Claire and Tony.

  “Guess this is our chance,” Claire said. “Let’s go.”

  Tony switched off the engine. He gathered the equipment bags from the backseat, and they approached the man at a slow pace. Claire didn’t want to startle him by rushing at him in the dark. As they came closer, she watched him watching them. One army private, one woman, emerging from a big car, not a particularly threatening combination and an unlikely disguise for German spies—Claire felt absurd, but they had to give it a try.

  “Well met by moonlight, proud Titania,” the man called to them in an English accent.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?” Tony whispered.

  “It’s Shakespeare,” Claire said.

  Tony groaned.

  She was heartened that the man had changed the quote from ill met to well met. “You won’t believe this, but I know that guy.” She hurried forward. “David Hoskins, how good to see you,” she called.

  “Indeed.” He looked wilted in the summer heat, his forehead beaded with sweat, his hair drooping as if he’d just come from the shower. “Welcome.”

  When Tony caught up with her, she said, “This is my assistant, Tony Pagliaro.”

  “Sir,” Tony said, shaking hands.

  Claire didn’t know what to say next.

  Hoskins puffed on his pipe, pleasurably filling his time. “So, what brings you two out here, if I may be so bold.”

  “We’re doing a story for Life magazine about research into penicillin and other antibacterial medications,” Claire said.

  “Odd time to do it.” Hoskins was amused.

  This threw Claire, but Tony stepped in: “Wartime, sir. Midnight, noon—it’s all the same to us. We’re working twenty-four hours a day. Like you and everybody else.”

  Claire realized that she adored Tony.

  “Absolutely.” Hoskins sucked on his pipe.

  Claire wished she could wake up. She felt as if the heat had addled her brain.

  “We came out here a while back,” Tony was saying, “and they showed us the demonstration lab, I guess you’d have to call it. Nice lab, but not what we needed.”

  “Ah, yes, the public information department does a fine job with the demonstration lab. Completely unrelated to the actual scientific labs, I’m afraid.”

  “We’d love to see the real labs,” Tony said.

  For a long moment
Hoskins said nothing. “How’s our mutual friend James Stanton,” he finally asked.

  “He’s well, thank you,” Claire said. “At least I think he is. He’s traveling. I haven’t seen him in, well, in a while. But he writes.”

  “The way of the world these days, isn’t it? We all have people we miss, I daresay.”

  “Yes,” Claire said, remembering that his family had died in the bombing of Coventry.

  “If you don’t mind my asking, what was your…game plan—would that be the proper American phrase?—your game plan for this evening?”

  “Oh, we’re just waiting to see what comes along,” Tony said nonchalantly.

  “Indeed. I wish you luck.”

  “So, uh, how do you like working here?” Tony asked.

  “No complaints. I rotate from place to place, however. No corporate loyalty for me. I’m lucky enough to be considered an expert in penicillin. I’m an expert valued for my expertise.” He laughed softly at this play on words. “Next week, Peoria, Illinois. The United States Department of Agriculture Northern Regional Research Laboratory. That’s quite a tongue twister, isn’t it?”

  “You said it,” Tony agreed.

  “Well, I’ve got to get back to work.” He retrieved the folded newspaper that he’d used to prop open the door. “In honor of my dear and much-missed colleague Dr. Lucretia Stanton, I will offer you this open door. I can’t be responsible for every ne’er-do-well who wanders through it. I’m sure you’ll find some very interesting items to photograph.”

  Tony grabbed the door. Hoskins left them, walking into a deserted hallway and through another door at the opposite end. Claire waited a moment, to let Hoskins distance himself from them, and then she and Tony followed.

  This is what Hanover & Company was hiding: a penicillin factory. Fully staffed and fully operational, twenty-four hours a day. Just like the factories for tanks, airplanes, guns, ammunition, and battleships. Except this factory made a weapon designed to save, not destroy, lives. Row upon row of racks ten feet high, filled with milk bottles growing green mold. Portable metal stairs to reach the high shelves. Trays attached to the stairs. Vials and beakers of yellow-brown fluid upon the trays. Dozens of women concealed in sanitary white, including face masks, moving up and down the stairs, harvesting the fluid with pipettes. Not science fiction. Science reality.

  Claire finally awoke from the daze of heat. She’d photographed factories many times, and she knew what to do: create a rhythm of geometric abstractions that made otherwise monotonous images riveting. On the far side of the racks were dozens of giant counter-current machines, used to purify the harvested fluid, hundreds of glass vials moving in a visual poetry of machinery, gleaming with reflections.

  In the next room, a group of scientists, all men, experimented with fermentation in table-size vats, an apparatus automatically stirring the fluid to keep oxygen moving through it. David Hoskins was working here, making his way from bench to bench, answering questions, offering advice.

  Claire saw her cover story for the magazine taking shape. This was what she was truly here for: not fumbling espionage, but the gift she had for creating evocative images. Mr. Luce would be pleased. She’d gotten the story.

  Three sharp-eyed MPs patrolled the lab to prevent employees from stealing penicillin for their dying mothers or their suffering children. Penicillin was for the military only. The MPs nodded at Claire, and she nodded in return, establishing an exchange of authority. They were part of Claire’s story, too. The MPs must have presumed that Claire and Tony were authorized: otherwise, why would Claire and Tony be here? Tony’s uniform must have reassured them, too. The MPs job was to prevent the theft of penicillin, not stop it from being photographed. Claire saw Tony chatting with the MPs. She photographed a small, tough-looking MP observing a scientist withdraw fluid from the fermentation vat for evaluation. Precious penicillin, permitted to save certain lives and not others.

  After an hour, Claire was finished.

  “Hey,” Tony whispered, “how about we leave through the front door, and on our way, we walk right across the reception area to the opposite side? My new friends in the military police say there’s some strange stuff going on over there. They haven’t bothered to mention it to their superior officers, who don’t exactly respect initiative from the guys at the bottom of the totem pole.”

  “You’re terrific, Tony,” she said. “You can make even the cops turn a blind eye.”

  Tony preened. “Well, the guys have orders to guard the penicillin, and that’s what they do. Besides, the guys and me, we’re on the same side, know what I mean?”

  “Yes, I think I do.” They packed the equipment, and Tony carried it. “Okay then, let’s do a little exploring,” Claire said.

  “See you around, fellas,” Tony called to the MPs.

  As Tony predicted, they walked past the guard in the reception area as if they were just part of the scenery. Tony preceded her in the opposite wing and opened the double doors into…into Tia’s soil lab, only a hundred times bigger. When she reached three dozen, Claire stopped counting the number of scientists at work.

  This was the much greater secret, Claire knew: the scientists were investigating nonpenicillin antimicrobials, and they were making progress. She understood this from their steady concentration and from their silence. No idle chatter, no consultation. Cigarettes burned down unsmoked in the ashtrays, leaving perfect, circular lines of ash.

  She was shocked that she was here, shocked that no one told her to stop. Claire would report this lab to Vannevar Bush. And she would photograph it, too. The setting was straightforward, and again, she knew exactly what to do. Her work was automatic: the racks of samples; the soil sprinkled onto petri dishes infected with strep or staph. The test tubes coming in and out of the incubator. Tia’s lab on a vast scale. This was another cover story. In her mind, she saw the layout spread before her.

  Gradually she felt the scientists watching her. One here, another there, looking up from their work, seeing her, consulting with one another. She worked faster. Suddenly she saw, and recognized, the most important work. She put a roll of Kodachrome in the Leica and put the long lens on the camera. She wanted to keep her distance. Here was a fire-engine red fluid being put through its paces. Over there, a carrot-colored fluid. On the far side, a dreadful green. On the other side of a glass partition, a purple fluid was being injected into mice.

  One of the scientists was making his way to a desk on the far side of the lab. The desk held a telephone. He picked up the receiver. She had thirty seconds left, no more. Then she and Tony would leave before they were thrown out or arrested.

  Her eye was drawn across the room to a transparent blue substance. A clear, flowing, brilliant blue. She concentrated on this. From a distance, she followed the several scientists working with it. One scientist, very tall, with curly black hair and thick glasses, took a small beaker of the medication to the area with the mice. Even from a distance, she was able to capture his injections of the substance into the mice. The color was so beautiful. It stood out. The Kodachrome, she knew, would capture it to perfection. These were the reasons she picked it from among the fire-engine red and the dreadful green: technically, it worked for the color film; and psychologically, readers of the magazine would feel attracted to it and want to learn more about it.

  Even as she and Tony hurried away, she continued to imagine this medication—someday, when Düsseldorf wasn’t a firestorm, when the Eastern Front wasn’t a thousand miles of Russian defeats—as the subject of a cover story on the penicillin cousins.

  Around 5:00 AM, Tony and Claire reached the approach to the access road of the Holland Tunnel. Dawn was breaking behind the New York City skyline, silhouetting the Woolworth Building and the Singer Tower in magenta. The air was cool and sweet, even here, amid the intersecting roads of New Jersey. Claire felt elated, invigorated, after her work through the night.

  “Pull over, Tony, would you?” she asked.

  “Yes, ma’
am, you’re the boss.”

  He pulled to the side, out of the flow of traffic. Claire took her Leica from the backseat and climbed onto the roof of the car. Her city. Her entire life, spent here. And still, on a morning in July, it was to her the most beautiful and exciting place in the world, as she captured the evolving colors of dawn behind and upon the skyscrapers.

  They drove the rest of the trip in silence. Through the Holland Tunnel, north on Sixth Avenue, across on Waverly, along the narrow streets of the Village. Striped awnings were unfurled on the town house windows, to keep out the sun and the heat during what would be a sweltering day.

  Stars, stars in the windows of town houses and tenements alike, everywhere Claire looked. There was the Castagnaro apartment, with three blue stars. That would be for Harry, Bob, and Bill. She remembered them from stickball games she’d dodged on her way to the grocery store or the subway when she was in college. Over there was the home of the O’Shea family, with one blue star. That would be for Peter, her fifth-grade beau. She’d lost track of him years ago. He must have joined up, too old to be drafted. In the window of a ground-floor tenement, a gold star. Mr. Martowski lived there. A widower. The star had to be for his son Harvey, just nineteen. She remembered Harvey peering into Charlie’s perambulator, when she’d come downtown to visit her mother shortly after Emily died. Harvey always seemed to have a penny string of red licorice hanging from his fist. His trousers were patched, his sweater had a hole in the elbow. Harvey Martowski, a boy whose mother had died young. Constance once told her that the other mothers on the block looked after him. Now he, too, was dead.

  Tony pulled up to her house, and Claire got out, retrieving the equipment. She had another assignment later, and she was happy to have a few hours to herself, a rare occurrence. With Charlie away, she’d given Maritza time off. She looked forward to a little luxury, a long bath and a lingering breakfast in the garden, cool beneath the thick canopy of trees, sunlight dappling through the shadows. She had thirty-two rolls of film in her bag. Tomorrow she’d take the film to Barnett’s fake New York office, which masqueraded as an importing and exporting firm near Union Square. The office wasn’t open now, and her next assignment might go late this evening. In the meantime she’d stash the film in her basement darkroom to keep it cool.