by Jack Du Brul
“Still, writing a book is a hell of an accomplishment.”
“I did it for my grandfather. If you saw the Web site you might have noticed the bit about the guy in Pennsylvania who tried to harness static electricity.”
“Your grandfather?”
“He was inspired by a machine he read about in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and knew he could make it work. He spent every night and weekend in his garage tinkering away. He burned it down once and spent a week in the hospital after nearly electrocuting himself. He got a chance to read my book before he died, but never knew that I managed to get it published. You indicated you wanted some information about Chester Bowie.”
“What can you tell me about him and what did he do to merit a mention in your book?”
“Bowie taught ancient history at a place called Keeler College here in New Jersey.”
“You’re in New Jersey?”
“Yes, I’m the marketing director for the new Deco Palace Hotel and Casino in Atlantic City. It’s great. Have you ever been here?”
“No, but I have a friend who considers Atlantic City his third home.”
“Third home, wow.”
“Not that impressive because he uses my place as his second. Anyway back to Bowie.”
“Chester Bowie taught ancient history at Keeler. From what I recall from my research he was a real flake. He muttered to himself all the time and always wore a cape around campus.”
“And what did he do to merit a mention in your book?” asked Mercer.
“Well he wasn’t a scientist but he was a crackpot. That’s why he’s in there. He was convinced that the creatures from Greek mythology actually existed.”
“You mean griffins, Medusa, and giant three-headed dogs?”
“Yup.”
“I guess that would certify him as a crackpot.”
“It’s not as bad as that,” Serena admitted. “What Bowie believed is that ancient Greek farmers plowing their fields discovered bones from animals that went extinct in the last ice age. Not knowing how the skeletons fit together, he believed they created all kinds of fantastic monsters from the bones, mixing and matching as they went along and then inventing stories about their creations.”
Mercer absorbed what she’d just said and couldn’t find any quick flaws in Bowie’s theory. It was a simple, elegant answer to a question he’d never considered, but it got him no closer to explaining how Chester Bowie came to be at a high-grade uranium deposit in Central Africa where he presumably vanished in the mid-1930s.
“He had no other interests? Geology for example?”
“Not that I’m aware of.” Serena paused. “I hate to say this but I don’t remember much about him. I wrote the book a few years before I got it published, and Bowie was only a couple of paragraphs. I still have boxes at home with some of my old research material. There might be something in one of them. I could look through it and mail you anything I find.”
Mercer considered her offer. He doubted he was on the right track even though the dates somewhat corresponded with what he knew. This could very well be the wrong Chester Bowie. However, he had nowhere else to turn. Pressed by a vague sense of urgency, he asked, “Would it be possible for me to come up and get them?” He sensed hesitancy. “I assure you I’m not a stalker or anything. I can even meet you at the hotel.” Mercer knew he’d have to bring Harry. The old bastard would pout for weeks if he knew Mercer had gone to a casino without him.
“Well, I suppose so. I can go home at lunch and grab the stuff. I’m pretty sure I know which box it’s in. Are you in New York?”
“No. D.C.” Mercer checked his watch. “How about five o’clock in the lobby.”
She gave a small laugh. “This hotel is huge. We’d never find each other. How about the Bar Americain. It’s right next to the casino’s main entrance.”
“Bar Americain it is. Five o’clock. And, Serena, thank you.”
“I’m glad I can help. I’ll even see what I can do about getting you a room comped.” Then she added as an afterthought, “I never asked. What’s this all about, anyway?”
“I’ll tell you when we meet. Suffice it to say that Chester Bowie found something and it sure wasn’t minotaur bones.”
Mercer checked the time again and decided it was still too early for Harry to be at Tiny’s, so he called White’s apartment. When he got no answer he tried Tiny’s but even the owner, Paul Gordon, wasn’t there. He climbed the back stairs up to the rec room to refresh the inch of tar-thick coffee fused to the bottom of his mug. Harry was slouched at the bar, pen poised over the Washington Post crossword, a Bloody Mary within easy reach.
“Morning,” he growled.
Mercer shook his head slowly. “Help yourself to my paper and booze.”
“Already done, my boy, already done.”
“Feel like going for a ride?”
“No.” Harry didn’t look up from the puzzle. “Tiny’s getting some guys together for a poker game tonight. I’m gonna crash on your couch this afternoon to rest up for it.”
“I’m going to Atlantic City.”
Still Harry remained slouched, but he didn’t miss a beat. “Drag, get your leash. You’re spending the day with Uncle Tiny.”
The dog raised himself over the back of the couch to regard his master through bloodshot eyes. His head was bowed so that his ears dangled past his long gray muzzle. He gave one soulful bawl.
“Sorry, pooch, I’m exchanging your crap for a game of craps today.”
“We’re getting a room for the night. Go home and pack. I’ll pick you up in an hour.”
“I’ll be ready in fifteen minutes.”
Atlantic City,
New Jersey
The tires of Mercer’s Jaguar convertible gave a slight chirp as he pulled into a spot near the top floor in the parking structure adjacent to the Deco Palace Hotel and Casino. He killed the engine but could do nothing to stifle the excited monologue Harry had kept up since getting off the Garden State.
“Then there was this time I was here, oh, must have been eighty-eight or eighty-nine with Jim Read. You remember Jimmy? For some reason he and I drifted apart when he got sober.”
“You drifted apart for the same reason feminists don’t hang out with pornographers,” Mercer said sarcastically.
Harry ignored his remark. “Anyway, we came up here and I have never seen someone as hot with the dice. Not Jimmy. I swear to God the dice would land on their edges for him. No, it was this little old biddy, well, she was probably five years younger than I am now, but could she roll. She must have gone on—”
“The way you’re going on now?” Mercer interrupted.
“Give me a break, will you. I haven’t been to a casino since you were in Canada.”
“That’s what, seven months, Harry?”
“Five. Tiny and I came up when you went back to finish your contract with DeBeers.”
Mercer unlimbered himself from the sports car. “And you took my Jag, no doubt.”
Harry held a Zippo to his Chesterfield and arched his brows at Mercer. “No doubt.”
From the elevator a moving walkway glided them through a long tunnel lined with advertisements for shows, restaurants, and of course, the gaming tables. Keeping with the hotel’s Art Deco theme, big band played over hidden speakers. The other guests riding with them were mostly older New Yorkers uniformly dressed in nylon sweat clothes in neon colors with gold chains resting on fleshy breasts for the women and mats of graying hair for the men. None of the couples spoke to each other. They seemed intent on getting to the games with as little distraction as possible.
The conveyor ended at the lobby. The expansive space was themed after the old iron-and-glass railway stations seen in hundreds of movies from the thirties and forties, but with Art Deco accents on the walls and numerous columns. The reception desk ran along one wall with a commanding view of the boardwalk and the ocean beyond. Opposite was a real locomotive, puffing ersatz steam, connected to a pair of beauti
fully restored Pullman cars. There were forests of potted palms and all the staff were dressed in period uniforms.
“There it is,” Harry said, pointing across the vast lobby to the Bar Americain.
“Leave it to you to find the bar.” Mercer checked his watch. They were a half hour early but he could use a drink.
They ducked into the bar, which was remarkably intimate despite its size. The room looked like it had been the set for Rick’s Café Americain from Casablanca. There was even a black piano player at an old upright, and while he was probably named Jamal or Antoine, his staff badge identified him as Sam.
Harry muttered, “I feel I should be wearing a tux and drinking champagne cocktails.”
They sat at the alabaster-topped bar. Harry ordered a Jack and ginger while Mercer asked for a gimlet.
“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world…”
Mercer recognized the voice at once, but couldn’t believe it. He swiveled on his bar stool. Cali Stowe wore a black suit with flared slacks and a cream silk shell. Her ruby hair danced and tangled to her shoulders. Her lips were such a bright red that he had trouble dragging his eyes to hers. There was humor in them that sparkled into a smile. She’d looked beautiful in Africa, unwashed and dressed in wrinkled safari clothes. Here she was absolutely stunning and it took Mercer a moment to get over his shock.
“Here’s looking at you, kid,” he finally stammered and saluted her with his glass.
“Buy a lady a drink?” She didn’t wait for an answer and addressed the bartender. “Dewar’s rocks with a water back.”
“Don’t get me wrong,” Mercer said, “but you are about the last person in the world I expected to see here. To what do I owe the pleasure?”
She took a sip from her drink. “I’m a compulsive gambler. Can’t stay away. Mortgaged the house, sold the car, the works. I live in a Dumpster out back.”
“I’m in love,” Harry said, then stood to introduce himself. “Harry White, at your servicing.”
She chuckled at his quip and they shook hands. “Hi, Harry. I’m Cali Stowe.”
Harry shot Mercer a glance before saying, “She was the one in Africa?”
She too gave Mercer an appraising look. “And now I’m here. What are the odds?”
“Pretty even if you’re meeting Serena Ballard.”
“Head of the class for the guy in the Armani sports coat.” She took the stool next to Mercer, forcing Harry to lean over the bar so he could ogle at her. “She and I spoke this afternoon, and imagine my surprise when she told me she already had a meeting to discuss Chester Bowie today.”
Still not over his shock, and delight, at seeing Cali, Mercer asked, “So are you going to tell me who you really are? Because I know you don’t work for the CDC. Their human resources guy nearly choked when I asked about you.”
“Ever heard of NEST?”
“Part of the Department of Energy, isn’t it?”
“It stands for Nuclear Emergency Search Team. I’m a member. Our main function is to act as a rapid response force in the event of a nuclear bomb strike or an attack at a nuclear plant. Back in 2003 our charter was changed slightly after President Bush went before the country in his State of the Union address and made a serious boo-boo by saying Saddam had gone uranium shopping in Africa. Because of that gaffe NEST has also been tasked with finding and securing previously unknown sources of uranium. There are ten of us on a team searching the world for old uranium mines, and places where uranium might be found.”
“So you weren’t lying about how you found that village.”
A shadow passed behind her luminous dark eyes and she took a quick sip of her Scotch. Some of her freckles blurred into an angry flush. “Sort of but not exactly. Someone at the CDC contacted me about that village having the highest cancer rate on the planet. When I took that info to my bosses they played around with it for a while, talked it over in a dozen meetings and committees, and finally shelved it, saying, and I quote, ‘There are more pressing matters.’”
“Let me guess,” Harry chimed in, “you went out on your own?”
Cali nodded, her good humor returning. “If you noticed I’m sitting kind of funny, it’s because most of my ass was chewed off when I got back to our field office in New York.”
Unbidden, Mercer’s mind conjured up the image of her backside. He was in little hurry to force it away but he remarked, “I saw you getting into a Town Car.”
“The head of NEST, Cliff Roberts, came to get me personally. That’s when the butt chewing began. Part of my left cheek is still in that Lincoln.” Cali tossed hair from her forehead in a simple gesture that held Harry entranced. “They bluffed about firing me, then about suspending me. In the end I was ordered to take a week’s worth of personal days and come back,” she deepened her voice to an approximation of her superior, “‘with the proper attitude of a team player.’ I envy you, Mercer, for not having to deal with government BS.”
“One of my first jobs was working for the USGS. It wasn’t bad as bureaucracies go but I knew I’d never make it there for long.” He thought back to their time at the village, making certain connections now that he knew her true purpose in being there. Some discrepancies came to light. “When you stepped into the bush for a little privacy…?”
“I was checking a Geiger counter. If you were anyone other than a geologist, I could have done it in the clear and made up a story. You would have seen through the ploy in a second, forcing me into the jungle with tales of diarrhea.”
“Sorry to cause you the embarrassment. Now that I think of it you weren’t all that pale coming back and you made a miraculous recovery.”
She grinned. “I’m not a method actor and I wasn’t kidding about having an iron stomach.”
“So what did the Geiger tell you?”
“There wasn’t much radiation above normal ambient. However large the lode was, it was all cleared out back in the thirties or forties and erosion would have carried away any contaminated soil long ago.”
“I’m leaning toward the 1930s,” Mercer told her. “Not long after Chester Bowie made his discovery.”
“And then the Germans came to mine what Bowie left behind?”
“That’s my guess. From what little Ms. Ballard told me about Bowie, I doubt he was a traitor, so I think someone caught wind of his find later on and came back to clear out the vein.” Mercer ordered another round. Sam/Jamal/Antoine, the piano player, must have thought there were enough patrons in the bar to start in on a pretty good rendition of “As Time Goes By.” He must have played that song a dozen times a day. “So how did you find Bowie?” Mercer asked. “I traced him through his schooling.”
“IRS database.” Cali sucked on an ice cube and both Harry and Mercer paused to watch her sensual mouth in action. She noticed the scrutiny and quickly crunched down on the cube. It was an absentminded habit that drew more attention than she intended. “In matters of national security, NEST can access some pretty powerful databases. Since I’m out sick, I had one of my teammates do the search. He led me to Keeler so I called the school’s president and he passed on the information about Serena Ballard’s book. I called her et voilà, here I am.
“What I don’t get,” she continued, “is what that mine has to do with a loopy classics professor. Serena filled me in a little about Bowie’s theories and it doesn’t jibe at all with what we found. If he went out playing amateur archaeologist to prove his theory about ice age bones, he would have gone to Greece. How did he end up in Africa?”
“With luck Serena’s notes might shed a little light on the subject.”
“That reminds me,” Cali said quickly. “The president of Keeler is ticked at her. She was supposed to have returned her research material to the school years ago. So make sure I tell her that it all has to go back.”
A lone woman in her forties entered the dim bar. Unlike the tourists ebbing and flowing into the room, she wore a business suit and carried a briefcase. She had long blond hai
r and a chubby round face. Mercer put her height at about five three and her weight somewhere around his own. He guessed that there was Pennsylvania Dutch not too far down her family tree. She spotted the trio at the bar and made her way across the room. It had to be Serena Ballard.
“Dr. Mercer? Ms. Stowe?”
“You found us,” Cali answered.
“Hi, I’m Serena Ballard.”
“Please call me Cali.” Even seated on the stool, Cali was almost a head taller than the casino executive.
“And people generally call me Mercer.” He shook her hand, noting that her eyes were cornflower blue. “This is my friend Harry White.”
Harry didn’t repeat his servicing joke again. His instincts had been spot-on that Cali would see the humor. He didn’t think Serena Ballard would. “Pleased to meet you.”
Serena looked first at Mercer and then to Cali. “Three years after my book comes out and not one but two people suddenly show an interest.”
“Mercer and I are working on the same problem from different perspectives and came to the same conclusion—you. Can we get you a drink?”
“Just a diet Coke. Why don’t we grab a booth away from the piano.” She hoisted her bag. “I brought everything I could find. Actually there is a lot more than I remembered and it reminded me that I was supposed to return it all to Keeler College.”
Cali grabbed up her and Serena’s drinks. “The school’s president asked me to ask you about that.” She then quipped, “He made it sound as though there was a long line of scholars clamoring for the Chester Bowie files.”
Once they were settled at a corner booth, Serena emptied the contents of the collapsible briefcase onto the table. There were about ten musty notebooks, several old manila folders, and clutches of loose papers. Mercer, Harry, and Cali started leafing through the notebooks. It was clear from the eager look on her face that Serena wanted to help but had little to add. “There isn’t much I can tell you. I looked through some of this in my office but I’m afraid it didn’t jog my memory. As I told you over the phone, I wrote the book a long time ago and Chester Bowie wasn’t a very big part of it.”