A Fierce Radiance

by Lauren Belfer

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  This was some smarmy guy. Why hadn’t he noticed that before? After all, Kreindler had been studying the man’s habits for weeks. Kreindler walked along First Avenue in the Sixties, the suspect on the other side of the street doing his usual errands amid the small grocery stores and pharmacies, the Greek shoe repair shop and the Chinese laundry. Old ladies peered out the tenement windows, kids played ball on the side streets. All the typical stuff going on. The summer was almost over, thank God. He’d had enough of the heat. He’d spent August biding his time, following this guy around, waiting to see what was what.

  Nothing out of the ordinary, so far. No strange meetings, no suspicious behavior. No visits to Central Park at off hours to put pieces of paper in trees, no doodling with blue chalk to set up meetings. This guy was turning about to be a tremendous bore. Kreindler had three men rotating in the watch (one of them, a young fellow in training for the FBI, was right now twenty feet behind), and they were going out of their heads with the boredom.

  Maybe Fritz was wrong about him. It was unlikely, though, that Fritz would even know the man’s name if there wasn’t something going on. Or maybe Fritz had deliberately given Kreindler incorrect information. Fritz had already (by his own account, confirmed by Kreindler’s contacts at the bureau) sent the FBI on a wild goose chase, so possibly he’d do the same to his dear old friend Marcus Kreindler. At any rate, Kreindler was working with the bureau on this evolving situation, as he thought of it. If Kreindler learned anything about Tia Stanton, he would, of course, inform Andrew Barnett. The bureau could take care of everything else: espionage was their job, after all. Kreindler knew how to play the turf game when it suited him.

  Sergei Oretsky. The perfect choice, if you were choosing a spy. Fritz knew all about him. A Russian refugee, his family trapped in France. The Germans had imprisoned the family in a camp, their survival dependent on the cooperation of poor Sergei in America. They weren’t Jewish, Fritz was very clear about that. Scared shitless, nonetheless—this reflection was accompanied by stentorian laughter, Fritz proving to himself how successful he and his Teutonic compatriots were at terrifying some harmless chump and his family.

  Kreindler remembered Fritz at dinner, on his third Pils and finally getting to the point. “The thing is, Marcus, the Reich needs the medications. The Reich needs penicillin. It needs whatever else the scientists are finding. These are weapons, Marcus. I know it’s hard to believe. But they are weapons.”

  Kreindler did believe him. “So this guy turn anything over to you?”

  “Nothing. Back in the spring, he said he was close to something, but poof—it evaporated. We’re getting impatient with him. He says he can give us promising sewage, as much as we want, anytime—but that’s Russian stuff. It’s madness.” Fritz shook his head at the monumental stupidity of Russians. “Not the solid results we want. But we’re putting the pressure on him. He’ll come through.”

  “And if he doesn’t?” Kreindler asked.

  To that, Fritz had bellowed with laughter once more. The answer was obvious.

  Now, watching Oretsky across the street, Kreindler almost felt sorry for the poor sod, caught up in this business, his life spinning beyond his control. Just another pawn in the great tournament of history. Kreindler wanted to know if Oretsky had been down by the river collecting sewage when Tia Stanton went for a walk along the cliff with a companion.

  Kreindler crossed First Avenue and walked behind Oretsky for a block, ignoring the FBI rookie. At the streetlight at the corner of First and Sixty-fourth, Kreindler picked up his pace. “Dr. Oretsky,” he said when he was beside him. “You remember me?” Kreindler had interviewed him right after Tia’s death. Kreindler automatically took out his identification to make everything official.

  Oretsky looked up at him, eyes wide. He was surprised, and frightened. Good. Kreindler had caught him off guard. Kreindler had chosen carefully, not approaching him at work, not at home, but here, on the street, to see if he would run, and to see if anyone else was watching. He planned to walk with him over to the river, take a nice stroll in the cool, late-day breeze on the East River Drive promenade. Nothing like a little visit to the scene of the crime to jostle the nerves.

  “Let’s go for a walk, shall we?”

  Oretsky slowly nodded his head.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Edward Rutherford stood beside a laboratory bench at Hanover & Company. Holding a test tube up to the light, he examined the fluid within it. The fluid was the most beautiful blue he’d ever seen. Transparent. Uncanny. He’d waited so long while the scientists did their work. Now it was late-October 1942, although in retrospect the time had passed in a flash.

  Didn’t scientists say that truth was beautiful? He’d read that mathematicians believed that you knew a proof was true if it was beautiful. He himself had heard many scientists remark on the ugly brownish yellow of penicillin. By contrast his medication had a clarity that gave him faith in it.

  Penicillin development was still moving forward in the opposite wing of the lab. The troops would have their penicillin, yes they would; Vannevar Bush would have no cause to threaten Hanover & Company. Even so, the number of military guards in the penicillin lab had been increased because of thefts at other companies. The guards were armed.

  No military guards for this medication, however. This belonged to him, and he now had his own reliable and discreet private security force in place. No one was going to steal this, not the substance itself nor any information about it. What happened at Claire’s house was unfortunate, to say the least. It could have been handled more neatly: step in when the house is empty, take the materials, the end. But no, the freelance guys he’d been using seemed to think they needed to make a point. Well, he’d made a point, too, and he’d fired them and hired replacements.

  Claire had never mentioned the incident (brave girl that she was—his daughter, of course), but sure, she must have been shaken up by it. No lasting harm done, however. And in the end, he was protecting Claire, guaranteeing her future and Charlie’s, by taking back those photographs. He absolutely could not let word get out. He could not lose control of this.

  He wished he could figure out a way to describe that blue. He’d collected art for decades without really looking at it. He’d only collected it because that’s what men like him were supposed to do. You went to a colleague’s house, or he came to your house, you looked at the art, you eased your way into conversation by revealing where you got this or that painting and hinting at how much you paid for it (the eternal competition), and before long you were discussing business. The paintings kept your secrets. He’d never, however, talked about what he believed was called the aesthetics of the art he collected.

  Only now, examining this extraordinary blue, did he understand why a man might devote his life to the study of art. And the best part was, this blue was worth far more than any painting.

  The scientists continued to work around him, on this and other substances. They never paid attention to what he was doing. He was the boss, after all. This special medication had a large team working on it, continuing the testing protocols on mice. Experimenting with increasing the yields. So far, the results had surpassed even his own high expectations. The substance worked against every bug they’d thrown at it, gram-positive and gram-negative, even TB. Still another team was trying to synthesize it chemically, so they wouldn’t have to worry about growing mold to produce it: synthesis would truly be hitting the jackpot.

  He prayed no one was catching up with him. The simultaneously wondrous and dreadful fact about these medications was that you could find the stuff they were made from in anybody’s garden. You could think you were onto something special, only to discover that the guy down the block had found it, too, the exact same thing, and was far ahead of you in the testing protocols.

  This was the medication that Nick Catalano had brought him. Catalano had been right about its potential. Maybe he really did find it whi
le visiting his parents in Syracuse. Maybe he didn’t. He’d paid Catalano off, and so, in the unlikely event it came up, he could rest easy on the competitive question of provenance, to borrow a term from art collecting.

  Soon his worries about being first would be over. Yesterday he’d filed for patent protection. An underling went to Washington, D.C., with the papers. An official at the patent office took the papers. No one uttered a word of protest. Rutherford purposely sent an underling, to show how routine the submission was. Just dropping off the papers. The development of these medications necessitated complex research and chemical modifications, and thus they should henceforth be considered invented rather than natural—that’s what he’d say if anyone challenged the process, but he was confident that no one would, because he’d fully comprehended the game. The troops would get their penicillin, the companies would patent the cousins.

  The blue substance was almost ready for human testing, and he needed a name for it. A number wasn’t good enough anymore. A number didn’t have poetry. The right kind of poetry had the ability to sell products. From his confidential contacts throughout the industry, Rutherford knew the names of other antibacterial medications making their way through the research protocols: Fumigacin, Clavacin, Patulin, Flavacidin. Absurd names. Who would ever want to say to his wife, “I’m heading over to the pharmacy to buy some Patulin”? It sounded like a laxative.

  He wanted to name his medication after Charlie. He also wanted to include some reference to the color. He believed that an old-fashioned name would inspire confidence. For a small fee, he was consulting with a classics professor up at Columbia. Betty, Rutherford’s secretary, had made the original contact. The professor turned out to be an obsessive who’d been sending Rutherford letters about medical linguistic precedent and about the etymology of penicillin, how the word came from the Greek for mushroom or fungus and the pen part meant fan and the…a trove of useless information.

  Rutherford did, however, learn from his professor that Latin had a word specifically for the blue of the sky: caeruleus. Cerulean, in English. Rutherford praised the wisdom of a language that had a word specifically for sky blue. Furthermore, Carolus was the medieval Latin for Charles, which was the English name borrowed from the French, which came from the Latin…the professor could write a book about this, and it would sell one copy. To himself.

  Caeruleus and Carolus. Similar in appearance and sound. He’d have to add the required -mycin, or -illin or plain old -in at the end. Apparently a scientific reason determined each particular ending, but Rutherford wouldn’t let that guide him. He found an unused pad, turned over the first page, and played around with some combinations. Finally he landed on it: Ceruleamycin.

  It was a little odd, but people would get used to it. Five years ago, who’d ever heard the word penicillin? Only a bunch of scientists. Ten years ago, who’d ever heard of sulfanilamide or sulfathiazole?

  Rutherford wanted people to think of the sky whenever they heard the name Ceruleamycin. Penicillin was a hideous brownish yellow, so you could promote it only on its effectiveness. Rutherford grasped his advantage: his medication had beauty and effectiveness, and now a marvelous name. The advertising plan took shape in his mind: Think blue. Once the medication caught on, he’d use some of the profits to set up a foundation for medical research, just like old man Rockefeller. He knew that would make Claire happy.

  Okay, he still had some problems to deal with. The medication had never been tested on humans. It could cause an allergic reaction, severe side effects, anemia, cancer, death. All his hopes might come to nothing. But at least his scientists were confident that the medication was ready for human testing. The next step was to find people to test it on. He needed to do mass trials, on many diseases, in a contained population. He’d heard rumors of imprisoned criminals volunteering for various types of medical tests, to do their part in the war effort. He’d also heard rumors of conscientious objectors to the war doing the same. And there were rumors of clinical trials being done at insane asylums or homes for the retarded; to Rutherford, this was going too far: he wouldn’t sully his medication by testing it on the retarded or the insane. In due course, he’d find the right group of critically ill patients to test it on.

  Staring at the test tubes filled with liquid blue, Rutherford felt a deep stirring within him, as if he were gazing into a crystal ball that showed him the secret of life itself.

  And when his secret was ready, he was going to sell it.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  North Africa. November 1942. The surgeon needed only to speak in code. “Iliac,” said Pete Mueller.

  They saw the bleeding artery in the bloody mess of the wounded soldier’s abdomen, and Jamie clamped it while Mueller went to the next problem, the perforated intestine.

  Jamie was in North Africa to conduct clinical trials on penicillin. Nick wasn’t with him: Nick was needed to monitor continuing research developments at home, and if Jamie were killed in the war zone, Nick would be able to carry the project forward.

  Jamie wasn’t a surgeon, but a shortage of doctors on the North African front meant that whenever needed, a physician assisted at surgery. Their operating room was in the basement kitchen of a French colonial school turned hospital, somewhere in the province of Relizane, Algeria, Jamie didn’t know exactly where, and he was so tired he no longer cared. Officially the Allied invasion the week before had been met with only light resistance. Light resistance: that was no consolation for the patient on the table before them. Jamie hoped he never had to witness heavy resistance.

  Now that the blood flow from the artery had been stopped, Jamie could examine the wound. Was there a gash in the stomach? Part of the liver gone? How had this poor kid lived long enough to get here? Well, he was here, and Mueller was sewing him up. The electricity started flickering on and off and then went off altogether. All in a day’s work at the North African front. One of the orderlies held up a flashlight to light the incision. After an hour or two or three of surgery, the boy was still alive, his pulse and blood pressure approaching normal. He might survive after all.

  Was it the middle of the night? The afternoon? Jamie had lost track. He worked when the patients came in. He felt as though he were sleepwalking. Sometimes he worked all night and all day, as time disappeared into endless action.

  Jamie had the penicillin waiting: the soaked pads like the kind he’d worked with in New York, to place upon the sewn-up incision after surgery; the fluid for the injections. Back in Newport News, Virginia, the troop staging area, he’d been told to prepare for an invasion task force of nearly 40,000 men. He had penicillin stocks for maybe a hundred men, if he was lucky. Yes, progress was being made in mass production, but the demand for the medication remained far greater than the supply.

  On the ship, he’d worked every day in the sick bay, because even among men being ferried to battle there were all the usual colds and influenzas, pneumonias and strep throats. Not to mention flare-ups of the ubiquitous syphilis and gonorrhea from congenial evenings in Newport News. But his penicillin was reserved for battle wounds.

  Reserved for this poor boy before him: Matthew Johnston, Chicago, Illinois, eighteen years old. Nurse Nichols, standing next to Jamie and holding the suction, always asked the boys where they were from before they went under anesthesia. Where are you from, I bet you’ve got a million girls chasing you there. You’ll be back up and at ’em before you know it.

  Jamie felt two warring emotions inside himself: to remember this boy with massive abdominal wounds, and to not remember this boy, so that he could just do his job and take his notes, be a professional without emotional concerns distracting him.

  The ground vibrated. That meant a bombing raid somewhere nearby. Mueller paused in midstitch, waiting for the rumbling to pass. The Allied airfields were grass, and the grass had turned to mud in the horrendous rains that started a few days ago, preventing the Allied planes from taking off. By contrast the German airfields were paved, and so the
German bombers were still able to strafe and destroy at will.

  “Okay, let’s wrap this up,” Mueller said.

  Nurse Nichols stepped forward to assist. When they were ready, Jamie placed the waiting penicillin pad over the closed incision.

  Mueller and Jamie changed out of their bloodstained surgical gowns and gloves in a pantry.

  “I’m going to take a nap.” Mueller was a Texan, with a big Texas boom of a voice. He was a terrific surgeon, and Jamie was filled with admiration for him. “Wake me if we’re under attack. I don’t want to sleep through my own demise.”

  “Will do.” Jamie enjoyed Mueller’s gallows humor, the dash and devil-may-care attitude, an aspect of the military professionalism Jamie was still reaching for: joking about your own death.

  Mueller wore a wedding ring. Advertised his marriage. He’d showed Jamie snapshots of his wife and three children. A family, a goal Jamie still hoped to attain.

  Dodging the orderlies who mopped the floors, Jamie and Mueller walked up the wide staircase with its intricately carved stone banisters. Green and blue tiles with geometric designs covered the walls.

  “Hey, doctor, how about a cup of coffee at the corner café?”

  They turned. Nurse Nichols was coming up the stairs behind them. Everywhere Jamie went, nurses. Nothing shy about them. They were a self-selected group, these frontline nurses. You needed a lot of courage and a tough stomach. Nurse Nichols was in her late twenties and quite a bit more experienced in the ways of the world than he was, Jamie sensed. Even in her standard-issue uniform, she was the most attractive nurse he’d seen among the many nurses of the U.S. Army Central Task Force fighting its way east across North Africa. She looked worthy of a pinup shot, the tossing mane of light brown hair, the wide face, the ample breasts pressing against her regulation shirt. He’d witnessed her walk through a ward and bring happiness to every wounded soldier simply by swaying her hips.